HO 3445 H3 
 umvERSITV OF CALIFORNIA ^AN DIEGO
 
 fPP&f^Y 
 
 f^ 
 
 1> :•{?;; ^■' 

 
 ^j^'-jKscii?\^ ^jsmm- ■^- I .-^r-MmsAMmiy 
 
 HD 
 .H3 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON: 
 
 APPLIED IN THE MANUFACTURE OF WOOLLENS. 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD EVERETT HALE, D.D., 
 
 Author of " Back to Back," " WoRKiNGMteN's Homes," "In His 
 
 Name," "Ten Times One is Ten," "The Man 
 
 WITHOUT A Country," Etc., Etc. 
 
 oJOic 
 
 BOSTON: 
 
 J. STILMAN SMITH & CO., 
 
 O^ce of "Lend a Hand" 
 
 3 Hamilton Place.
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1888, by 
 
 J. STILMAN SMITH & COMPANY, 
 in the office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington. 
 
 Typography by J. S. Gushing & Co.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 The author supposes that this Essay on the 
 Christian relations of the capitalist and the 
 workman will be more generally read if it is 
 presented in narrative form. 
 
 It is proper to say that the details bearing 
 on the business of manufacture have the au- 
 thority of a well-known and successful manu- 
 facturer of woollens. 
 
 I am myself the person who was invited, 
 in 1873, by the proprietors of three different 
 woollen mills, to take them and carry them 
 on on the plan proposed. I received these in- 
 vitations because I had blocked out this plan, 
 or rather a manufacturer of large experience 
 had blocked it out for me, in a story which I 
 published at that time in Harper's Magazine, 
 called "Back to Back."
 
 IV PREFACE, 
 
 Unfortunately for me, I was not trained to 
 the woollen manufacture, and could not take, 
 therefore, the difficult part which Mr. Spinner 
 takes in this book, as Max Rising took it in 
 that. I was therefore obliged to decline the 
 three proposals. But in this book, as the 
 reader will see, I have supposed that Mr. 
 Spinner accepted one. 
 
 EDWARD E. HALE.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. How THEY Lived at Hampton .... i 
 
 n. The Plan 24 
 
 HI. The Results 32 
 
 IV. The Store 58 
 
 -V, The Enterpriser 90 
 
 VI. Children's Work 108) 
 
 VII. The School 125) 
 
 VIII. Hours of Work 142 
 
 IX. The Church (155) 
 
 "~"~X. The Public Library 175 
 
 XI. Entertainment 183 ^ 
 
 XII. Temperance (293^ 
 
 XIII. The Savings Bank 211 
 
 XIV. Work and Labor ^32 j 
 
 XV. Communism 250 
 
 XVI. Conclusion &o^
 
 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 
 
 HAMPTON was a little factory town where 
 was one woollen mill, which represented 
 an investment of perhaps sixty thousand dol- 
 lars. The village was pretty, — a little more 
 four-square and set in its plan than I should 
 have made it, — but with evident arrangements 
 of comfort for the workingmen and working- 
 women. Lines of maples, about twenty years 
 old, or rather less, shaded the streets, growing 
 perhaps a little too near the fronts of the 
 houses. The houses were not in blocks. 
 They were separate from each other, and each 
 house had the command, if I may so speak, of 
 as much as an acre of land, as a home garden. 
 I noticed, as I walked about the village and 
 pushed my explorations into the back streets, 
 that, in many instances, the lots connected with 
 back lots, so that these gardens were consider-
 
 2 HOW TUKV LIVED IN IIAMl'TON. 
 
 ably more than an acre. The mill was just off 
 the village street, built close to the Beaver 
 Brook, which was dammed up to make the 
 waterfall which provided power. A church, a 
 town hall, and a schoolhouse faced three sides 
 of a little public square, which was planted with 
 trees and flowers, in the midst of which there 
 was a fountain. I noticed a stand for a band 
 on one side of the square. 
 
 I had been following Beaver Brook, and what 
 the geography would call its tributaries, far up 
 into the woods and hills, and had returned to a 
 late dinner, with a basket of trout quite as 
 heavy as I cared to carry. The plan had been 
 that we were to drive down the valley after din- 
 ner, and see what was to be seen of a certain 
 mound in the fork of the river and brook, which 
 either was or was not built by the Aztecs, or by 
 Chippewas, or some other Indian tribes, and re- 
 garding which we were to form an opinion 
 while we spent a pleasant afternoon. But the 
 appearance in the west of black clouds, which 
 made a thunder storm certain, broke up these 
 plans for a drive, and so I found myself sitting 
 with Mr. Spinner, my host, on the broad east- 
 ern piazza, with the chance for a long talk, 
 which business, amusement, or the interruption 
 of guests had not permitted during my visit. 
 
 "Now you can tell me," said I, "how you
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 3 
 
 came here, what you did first, and what you did 
 last, why you did it, and where you did it, when 
 you failed, and when you succeeded. " 
 
 Spinner laughed. " I am not a story-teller," 
 said he, " and I shall be apt to put the cart be- 
 fore the horse. The story will fail in what the 
 magazines call artistic or sesthetic grouping or 
 arrangement. But if you put me on my hobby, 
 I shall ride him, and you will have to see his 
 paces." 
 
 I said I wanted nothing better. 
 
 "I like to tell the story," he said. "I have 
 seen it all, — I and Nancy here, — and we have 
 been a good deal of it. But we should not 
 have done what we have, nor would you see 
 what you see here, but for the loyal help of 
 the people here ; no, nor if, on the whole, the 
 country had not been behind us. At bottom, 
 John, this is a country of workingmen. The 
 wealth in the hands of a few rich men is easily 
 seen and easily talked of. But, for all that, 
 the amount in the pockets of the People — the 
 People with a large P, as that man said in his 
 speech — is vastly more than the amount at 
 the bank accounts of a few nabobs. Indeed, I 
 often think of that phrase of Quincy's, that the 
 servant-girls of Boston owned the palaces on 
 their Back Bay. He meant that the servant- 
 girls made the deposits in the savings banks,
 
 4 HOW THKY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 which enabled them to lend to the palace-build- 
 ers all the money they wanted. 
 
 "So the country sympathizes with industry, 
 with contrivance, with work. That sympathy 
 shows itself in law, — well in fashion, though 
 the newspapers do not think so, — in public 
 sentiment. And this makes, oh, Freeman, it 
 makes no end of difference. I would not run 
 a mill in Mexico, — not if you would giv^e me 
 forty-five ingots of silver to build into the foun- 
 dation. Nay ; when I remember how I heard 
 a Manchester woman from England once, in a 
 New Hampshire valley, hold up her hands to 
 heaven and invoke its ' curse on them that built 
 the chimbleys which shut out God's light,' from 
 her old home, in the England she had deserted ; 
 w^hen I heard that, I was glad I was not making 
 cloth in England. I like to work where I have 
 'the country behind me.' " 
 
 Then Spinner asked me if I remembered 
 where we had heard that phrase. I did remem- 
 ber it very well. Captain Greely had given an 
 account, intensely exciting, of his Arctic ad- 
 ventures. And he told us how he encouraged 
 the men by telling them that they had " the 
 country behind them." 
 
 "Well," said Spinner, as he picked up the 
 thread of his history, and as little Mary Spinner 
 brought me a Bartlett pear and a fruit-knife,
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 5 
 
 " to begin at the beginning, we began when 
 everything was horribly depressed. I suppose 
 that is a good time to begin. If the sand and 
 gravel has been swept off the rock, you have a 
 clean underpinning. You can build on the rock, 
 and no mistake, and for that there is good Scrip- 
 ture. It was in the autumn of 1874. I had been 
 the foreman in the dyeing-room — head-dyer I 
 was called — in the Andalusia Mills, at Groton. 
 Perhaps you remember how high up they went," 
 he said, rather grimly, " higher than a kite. 
 The selling agent knew as much about wool as 
 I know about quaternions. He chose to buy 
 our wool, as well as to sell our goods. He left 
 the business mostly to his sons, who knew more 
 of billiards than I know of teazles. And the 
 upshot of it all was that there was that first- 
 rate smash-up. Stockholders and all were mad. 
 Andalusia Mills were sold under the hammer to 
 some Germans, and they brought in their own 
 people to run them, if and when they opened 
 again. So I and Nancy here, with our two 
 babies, were left out in the cold. 
 
 " Meanwhile the country was drugged or 
 flooded, or whatever you call it, with every 
 sort of woollen goods. And it did seem as if 
 the man was a fool who made any more. 
 
 "Just at that time I met at some sort of 
 a committee meeting our old friend Thankful
 
 6 HOW THEV LIVED IX HAMPTON. 
 
 Noursc ; we were both trustees of a working- 
 man's building fund. I walked home with 
 Nourse, and, well, yes, I told him a few bottom 
 truths on the subject of investment. He had 
 been in the Andalusia, and now had the pleas- 
 ure of seeing the same stock quoted at '35, no 
 buyers,' for which his father had given two or 
 three hundred a share. 
 
 "I told Nourse that it was just what the 
 Scripture said. He had had his good things, 
 and now he had his evil things. I told him 
 that if he had known how to manufacture 
 Avoollens, and had chosen to use his knowl- 
 edge, he would have saved much of his invest- 
 ment. 
 
 " ' Instead of which,' I said, 'you chose to go 
 to the Islands of Greece, and up the Nile, and 
 across the desert to Damascus, and you left 
 the business of manufacturing to some people 
 who knew nothing about it.' Nourse answered, 
 rather grimly and gloomily, that he knew that 
 very well, quite as well as I did, and that he did 
 not come to have his memory refreshed. 
 
 "'No,' I said, 'I did not mean to annoy you. 
 But I meant to say this, that there are two dif- 
 ferent rates by which capital ought to be paid. 
 One is the rate by which I am paid for my 
 money when I do not take care of it, and take 
 no risks. This is a much lower rate than the
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 7 
 
 rate to be paid me when I take care of it my- 
 self, and when I do take some risk.' 
 
 " * Of course,' Nourse says ; ' every one agrees 
 to that.' 
 
 " Yes, every one agrees to that. But I have 
 not found that all people agree to what follows. 
 Yet I think it is clear. It is not very hard, in 
 any country, to find out about what capital is 
 worth (say) for idiots or fools of any sort, or for 
 people who do not want to take care of their 
 money, if they knew how. It is clear enough 
 that the long government loans, such loans as 
 the English consols, represent the minimum 
 rate of interest. An idiot or his guardian 
 would be sure of his interest. He takes no 
 care of the investment, but his investment is 
 sure. And I went on to say that while Nourse 
 was going up the Nile, or was crossing the des- 
 ert, or even if he had a paralytic stroke which 
 lasted seventeen years, the Andalusia people 
 ought to have paid him at that rate of interest, 
 and that he had, indeed, in equity, an absolute 
 right to it. 
 
 "Nourse began to see what I was driving at ; 
 and he said that if that were all capitalists 
 were to have, nobody would ever bother to use 
 money for manufacturing. They would try gov- 
 ernment bonds and be done with it. 'And you 
 fellows,' said he, ' who are now very willing to
 
 8 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 take our subscriptions to your stock, would find 
 there was no money to build the mills with, or 
 to buy the first bale of wool.' 
 
 " I said I knew that ; and that I did not mean 
 to limit them to that. But I said, that for what 
 followed this minimum rate, they became, to a 
 certain extent, adventurers. What followed was 
 something like a second-mortgage bond, — not 
 so sure in its essence as the first. ' You are 
 entitled,' I said, 'to what we will call the Idiot 
 Rate, — the average rate of " Governments," 
 — though the sky should fall, in bad times or 
 good times. But for after profit, you must take 
 the chances, just as the retailer does, who sells 
 you satinets and broadcloths, — or just as the 
 tailor does, who has pieces of them on his 
 shelves, and cannot sell them. When the An- 
 dalusia people paid you that swamping dividend 
 of eleven per cent, six or eight years ago, three 
 per cent or a little more came to you because 
 it was the worth of the money, and nearly 
 eight per cent came to you because that was 
 a good year, and because then you had some 
 intelligent people at the fore.' 
 
 "Nourse growled that it was long since he 
 had had any such good fortune, — that he was 
 a fool not to sell out then, and that he never, he 
 hoped, should be such a fool again. 
 
 " But I went to see him, the next day, and we
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 9 
 
 followed up the conversation. I told him, that 
 even in the depressed condition of affairs which 
 we were in, there were as good chances as ever 
 for going into the business of making woollen 
 cloths. I said that I did not believe that wear- 
 ing warm clothes in winter was going out of 
 fashion. 
 
 " Nourse said that the tariff might change, 
 and England and Germany might undersell us. 
 He had burned his fingers once, and he would 
 not burn them again, — and so on and so on. 
 
 " As for tariffs, I said that the country would 
 long want a large revenue, and was used to 
 gathering it by import duties. I said that the 
 country was really governed by its workingmen, 
 and that they would be slow to injure them- 
 selves. And I said that whether there was a 
 high tariff or not, we are an ingenious people, 
 and a numerous people ; that the nearer the 
 mill was to the shop on the one side, and to 
 the man who made the coat on the other, the 
 better was the chance of the man who carried 
 on the mill. Any way, I said, I had been edu- 
 cated to make woollen cloth, that was my pro- 
 fession, and I did not expect to give it up ; that 
 there were hundreds of thousands of Americans 
 as good as I, who had been trained to that pro- 
 fession, and that we had somewhere between 
 forty and fifty million people about us who
 
 lO HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 were glad to wear the cloth we had made. He 
 laughed good-naturedly, and said he was glad I 
 was in such good heart. And I reminded him, 
 that however much he had suffered by the An- 
 dalusia, I had suffered more. 
 
 "But, indeed, those were black times in our 
 business. O ! I cannot tell you how many mills 
 shut down, — all the weak ones, — most of the 
 little ones, — and indeed a good many which no 
 one would ever have called weak until then. It 
 happened that I wrote an article about manu- 
 facturing, in a weekly paper, which attracted the 
 attention of some business men, and from that 
 article it was that I received, through the edi- 
 tor's hands, three letters, from three different 
 sets of people, asking me if I did not want to 
 bring to life three different broken-winded wool- 
 len mills, in three different parts of the country. 
 One of them was in Ohio ; one of them was in 
 Middlesex, in Massachusetts ; and the third was 
 a mill here in Hampton. I do not say it was 
 this mill, though here is the old sluice-way, the 
 old wheel in fact, and in part the old founda- 
 tion. But, really, we have changed almost every- 
 thing, and the village, as you see it, is practi- 
 cally new. 
 
 " If I do not tire you, or bore you, I will tell 
 you how it came about." 
 
 I said it would not bore me at all ; that, in
 
 HOW THEV LIVED AT HAMPTON. I I 
 
 fact, I had come to Hampton to find out, if I 
 could, the secret of their success, and that the 
 more he Hked to tell me, the better I should be 
 pleased. So Spinner began again. 
 
 "I do not pretend that I should have launched 
 out into this, if the Andalusia had held on. I 
 had a good salary there, and it was very con- 
 venient and very pleasant to draw ray pay with 
 the rest, to salt down what I wanted, and to let 
 a strong company behind me take all the risks 
 of the business. I have never wondered that 
 men are so eager to go into positions where 
 they have fixed pay, regularly paid. But the 
 Andalusia had not held on. It had been blown 
 up 'higher than a kite.' I had Nancy and the 
 babies in a world which was full of Thankful 
 Nourses ; I mean, full of men who were afraid 
 of manf uacturing, — that is, were afraid of the 
 very enterprises on which my bread and butter 
 and my babies' milk and spoons depended. That 
 was really the reason why, when the third of 
 these mills was offered me, I began to ask my- 
 self whether I had not better face the music ; in 
 fact, whether I must not face the music. The 
 Ohio letter I had answered right away, with a 
 civil refusal. But the Middlesex letter and this 
 Hampton letter came together, by one mail. 
 That interested me, and made me think some- 
 thing might be done, and I sent for John
 
 12 HOW THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON, 
 
 Workman, and asked him to come and see 
 me. 
 
 " No. He is not one of the Worcester Work- 
 mans. That is another family. His father came 
 from Maine, and afterwards went to Wisconsin. 
 
 " I sent for John Workman, and he came to 
 me. He was out of work, as I knew he was, and 
 I knew that he would know some of the best 
 hands we had had at the Andalusia. The de- 
 pression of all business was as hard for them as 
 it was for the manufacturers. Well, I had much 
 the same talk with him that I had had with Mr. 
 Nourse, only now I began, so to speak, at the 
 other end. But I told Workman that he and I 
 had our chance now. We had often said that 
 the rate of wages ought to rise with good times, 
 if it was to fall with bad times. But I had three 
 mills offered to me to carry on, and thought I 
 was not without hopes that I could persuade 
 Nourse to give some sinews of war. So I said 
 to Workman that if he could get a lot of men 
 together who were willing to work at minimum 
 wages, but to be so far partners in the concern 
 that if times improved their wages should im- 
 prove, we had our chance. I told him that the 
 ' bloated capitalists ' were, for once, as badly off 
 as the men who worked with their brains and 
 with their hands, and that for once we had a 
 chance to begin in our own way.
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 1 3 
 
 " Now, as I said before, in ordinary times, and 
 especially in prosperous times, this would have 
 been mere talk, and nothing more. But Work- 
 man had nothing to do, and he had a family to 
 feed. He knew several of our best friends, as 
 I have said; and they had nothing to do, and 
 they had their families to feed. He brought 
 two or three of them to me, and we had long 
 conversations. It ended in my getting more 
 promises from them, which I was able to carry 
 to Mr. Nourse. They were willing to take hold 
 with me ; I did not say on shares exactly, but 
 really it was much the same way that the fisher- 
 men, or in old days the whalers at Nantucket, 
 go, or went, for their enterprises. That is to 
 say, everybody there was to be sure of his ra- 
 tions as far as anything could be sure ; but for 
 the rest, it all depended upon whether our voy- 
 age were a good one or not. The men wanted 
 to divide every three months, but I would not 
 agree to this. I said the voyage must last two 
 years before there was a division. They were 
 rather a superior class of men, — they were in- 
 terested in the plan. They were all running 
 behindhand, and drawing on their bank ac- 
 counts ; and they finally agreed that our voy- 
 age should be a two years' voyage before we 
 made any dividend. That is to say, they agreed 
 to just what Nourse agreed to. All that was
 
 14 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 to be absolutely promised was a 'starvation pay- 
 ment,' and the rest was to be part of the ven- 
 ture. 
 
 " Let me say, by the way, that in any such 
 enterprise you are able to rely on the love of 
 adventure which exists in all men's hearts. 
 Why, Freeman, if you thought it was right, 
 you would like to buy a lottery ticket yourself 
 to-day, and you are really sorry that you know 
 it is wrong. 
 
 " As for me, I was between the two, with 
 Workman. We were a sort of buffers, to take 
 all the pounding. We were to be scolded by 
 both sides, and have all the responsibility of 
 everybody's failures. We were to be responsi- 
 ble with the present owners of the mill, which- 
 ever way we should take. We were to make 
 the engagement with Nourse, and the engage- 
 ments with the men. When we were fairly 
 running, if ever we were fairly running, I was 
 to buy the wool, and I was to sell the cloth. I 
 was to make the journeys to New York, and I 
 was to have money enough in the strong-box 
 every Saturday night to pay the starvation 
 wages we had agreed upon, and at the end of 
 every third month to pay Nourse the ' idiot 
 dividend ' on his capital. Workman was to 
 take the personal oversight of the manufacture, 
 to turn the raw wool into woollen. That is to
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 1 5 
 
 say, we were to be these hated middle-men 
 whom we had abused so often, and whom we 
 had heard cursed so often. I did not much like 
 to be a middle-man ; but it was very clear that 
 Nourse did not mean to run this mill, but was 
 going off to the Sandwich Islands. And the 
 people who owned it did not mean to run it. 
 If they had meant to, they would not have of- 
 fered it to me. 
 
 " I showed the men's agreement to Nourse, 
 and I got a half-way promise from him that, if 
 I started such a plan, he might put in some 
 money. How much he would put in, I did not 
 know. But on the strength of his promise I 
 drew fifty dollars out of my bank account, and 
 took Workman with me, and we came down to 
 see this place. I can tell you that it did not 
 look much as it does now. It had been badly 
 planned, badly managed, and had come to grief. 
 A poor broken-winded mill at the best ; and 
 when we saw it, it had no wind at all. The 
 people had all gone away except an old man 
 who was keeper, and who had his machinery, 
 such as it was, clean and in good order. But 
 it would evidently take a good deal of money, 
 and I no longer wondered that the people had 
 written to me to offer it to me. 
 
 " If you care anything about it, I will show 
 you to-morrow the papers that passed between
 
 l6 HOW THI£V LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 mc and them, and I sliould like to show you 
 some photographs which show what it was 
 when we took hold. 
 
 " But, to make a long story short, for Nancy 
 wants us at tea, it ended in my persuading 
 Noursc to buy the whole concern, and for the 
 present to hold the deed. But he took me as 
 partner, and John Workman as another partner; 
 and we drew out our bank accounts, — I had 
 nearly two thousand dollars then, and Workman 
 had five or six hundred, — so that we might be 
 with him in good faith partners in co-operation. 
 And it was agreed that any man who worked in 
 the mill three months might become a stock- 
 holder with us. Indeed, Nourse agreed to sell 
 out all his stock if we chose. We were to allow 
 him four per cent a year, as what we all called 
 in joke the 'idiot's dividend,' which was to be 
 paid as our first charge after we had paid what 
 we called ' starvation wages ' and our other run- 
 ning expenses. 
 
 " For the rest, I was to be permitted, for my 
 salary as manager, to draw six hundred dollars 
 a year, as the men drew their wages. Work- 
 man was to draw the same. After the end of 
 the second year we were to see where we were. 
 That is to say, the first voyage should then be 
 considered over. Profits, for we took it for 
 granted there would be profits, were then to be
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 1/ 
 
 divided into three equal parts. Nourse was to 
 have one-third ; Workman and I, as managers, 
 were to have one-third ; and the men were to 
 have one-third. Of course, as fast as they 
 bought out Nourse's stocli, they also became 
 capitalists, and took their earnings as such. 
 The scheme would work, however, if none of 
 them took any of his share. 
 
 " However, you had better see all this on 
 paper, and I will show you the articles of agree- 
 ment after Nancy has given you a cup of tea. 
 
 " When the papers were finally passed I had 
 Workman with me, and he brought with him 
 one of the best of the men who had agreed to 
 try the new plan at Hampton, whose name was 
 Holmes. We had gone all over the business 
 pretty carefully, and I thought Mr. Nourse 
 wanted to get away. But the other two still 
 lingered, and finally Holmes broke the silence, 
 and said : — 
 
 " * I wanted to say to you, Mr. Nourse, and I 
 think Mr. Spinner would like to say the same 
 thing, that we are not going into this thing as 
 a mere matter of business. It is a matter of 
 business, and we will hold to our promise as 
 men of business. But we like the plan really, 
 and we like it because it seems to us to be fair 
 all round. There is a great deal of bad talk — 
 you must excuse me if I say I think it is on all
 
 l8 HOW THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 sides — about the relations of what people call 
 labor and capital. For myself, I never called 
 myself a laborer ; I always called myself a 
 workman, and I think there is a difference be- 
 tween work and labor. But that is neither 
 here nor there. I, for one, do not want to en- 
 courage hard language between men like you, 
 Mr. Nourse, who have money, and men like me, 
 who want to do an honest day's work, who ex- 
 pect to be paid for it, but who do not expect 
 anything more than our pay. I should think 
 that, if you will let me say so, was the Chris- 
 tian way of stating this thing, and though I do 
 not make much pretence as a religious man, I 
 am a member of the church, and I do want to 
 go forward in my everyday work, as I do in 
 what I say on Sunday, on Christian principles. 
 Now, if you do not think I am talking too long, 
 — and my wife often tells me that I do talk too 
 much, — I should like to explain what I mean 
 by Christian principle.' 
 
 " Mr. Nourse said, with a great deal of feel- 
 ing, that he was very much obliged to him ; 
 that he would stay all night to hear what he 
 had to say. For he said he had made this 
 thing a matter of prayer himself, and he wanted 
 to know, if he could, what were the Christian 
 relations which bound him to the men at work 
 in the establishments where he had any inter-
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. I9 
 
 est. He said, very earnestly, that anybody was 
 unjust to him who said he merely wanted to 
 screw out of his money the most that could be 
 got for it ; that he had read and talked and 
 studied, in hope of finding out what these same 
 Christian relations were. He would be very 
 much obliged to Mr. Holmes if he would take 
 all the time he wanted to state his view about 
 it. 
 
 " Holmes seemed somewhat encouraged by 
 this declaration, but he said, with a half laugh, 
 that we should not want to stay till midnight. 
 * Indeed, it is all in very short language in the 
 New Testament, where it says we must bear 
 each other's burdens. It says that no man is 
 to live for himself alone, and no man is to die 
 for himself alone. For my part, I do not think 
 I should work a day if I were not pleased with 
 the thought that I was doing my share to clothe 
 a man who cannot clothe himself as well as I 
 can clothe him, — some poor fellow off in Da- 
 kota or catching whales in the Arctic Seas, 
 maybe,' he said, laughing. ' I want to do my 
 share in the work of this world. It happens 
 that I have been trained to do this as a weaver. 
 I call myself a good weaver, and I think I am 
 able to teach other people something about 
 weaving. If I did not think so I should go 
 about something else ; I would not come with
 
 20 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 W'oikmaii to this mill. But I want to do this 
 as a disciple of Jesus Christ and a child of God. 
 I want to do it in such a way that I shall not be 
 ashamed of doing it when I come to die. 
 
 " ' Now, Mr. Nourse and Mr. Spinner both,' 
 he said, ' this plan of yours is somewhat new in 
 the way in which you have set it up. It really 
 implies, as far as I can see, all that I have ever 
 contended for when I have made speeches, as I 
 have often done, in our trade-union meetings. 
 If you will let me say so, this plan, as Mr. 
 Spinner has drawn it up, throws our business of 
 manufacturing on very much the same ground 
 on which most business is done in America. 
 Men are used to such a union as I make, and 
 as Workman makes, with Mr. Spinner and any- 
 body he has with him to carry on this mill. 
 Men know perfectly well that there must be a 
 director or manager ; there must be somebody 
 to make plans and somebody to carry out plans ; 
 and we are not such fools as to suppose that 
 that somebody is to work without being paid 
 for it. I am not such a fool as to suppose that 
 he will know how to do his work without learn- 
 ing how. We are not, therefore, jealous at all 
 of the man who directs our industry, who man- 
 ages the concern, who says what is profitable 
 and what is not profitable, and who buys and 
 sells our goods. If you will think of it, that is
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 21 
 
 exactly what is done in every wholesale store or 
 retail shop. There is a man who buys my gro- 
 ceries, for instance ; he knows where to buy 
 them and how to buy them cheaply, and, al- 
 though he sells them to me for half as much 
 again as he gave for them, I do not c^uarrel 
 with him. It is a convenience for me to buy a 
 pound of sugar instead of buying a barrel of 
 sugar, and I do not quarrel with the man who 
 gives me that convenience. But, behind the 
 grocer, there is a bank, which lends him money 
 and provides him with the capital which he is 
 going to use. Now here, Mr. Nourse, I am not 
 sure that you would agree with me, but I am 
 telling you the average opinion of American 
 workmen about the relationship of that bank to 
 that grocer. They say that the bank provides 
 him with capital at certain rates, which do not 
 vary very much from time to time. There was 
 once a time when they were even fixed by law 
 at six per cent, or thereabouts. No one says 
 that was wise, and I suppose it was not wise. 
 Still, this is certain : those rates do not go up 
 and down in exact correspondence with the ups 
 and downs of business. When my grocer has 
 very little custom he does not find that the 
 banks lend him money any more readily be- 
 cause he wants it more. In fact, he does not 
 tell the bank very accurately what the state of
 
 22 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 his business is ; they do not ask him very care- 
 fully. They are careful to know if his credit is 
 good, — that he does not press them too hard, 
 — and if he is safe they lend him money. 
 
 "'I say that is the relationship in which people 
 arc in the habit of using capital in America. 
 That is exactly the relationship which you have 
 established with us in this contract you have 
 made. Please to observe, then, that it is the 
 arrangement which we are used to. It is the 
 arrangement Vv'hich we see succeeds in other 
 forms of business. That is the reason why we 
 like it better than an arrangement in which, if 
 business happened to be very prosperous, if 
 sales were very quick, and our goods particu- 
 larly in demand, the capitalist should make the 
 usual profit on that account, while our wages 
 would rise but slowly, if they rose at all. 
 
 " ' I think Mr. Spinner said that we are not 
 above liking the excitement of good times, and 
 we are men enough to take the pressure of bad 
 times. Here is the reason why we are willing 
 to share and share. 
 
 " ' Beyond that, I should like to assure you, 
 Mr. Nourse, who seem to represent capital in 
 this conversation, and you, Mr. Spinner, who 
 seem to represent skill in manufacturing and in 
 trade, — I should like to assure you both that 
 we shall like this plan, not simply because we
 
 HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. 23 
 
 think we are going to have more money in our 
 pockets at the end of two years, but because it 
 seems to us exactly fair. It seems to us that 
 now we bear your burdens, and, if you will let 
 me say so, that you bear ours. When I go to 
 church, I am apt to hear a good deal of this 
 talked about. And I find that I am very apt to 
 get thinking that this is the practical side of the 
 Christian religion ; and if we can only succeed 
 here on our part, and you on your part, in keep- 
 ing this in mind, why, we shall be working out 
 the Christian relations of capital to workmen. 
 It will not be a great while, as it seems to me, 
 before we cease talking about your part and our 
 part, and shall feel that we are all engaged in 
 one concern. This I can assure you of, — that 
 under such a plan as this, you are certain to 
 have picked workmen and workwomen. I do 
 not know how much you have thought of it, but 
 it is a great thing to have a contented set of 
 people. It is not a bad thing to have a set of 
 men who know they are trying an experiment, 
 and I can promise you that while there is any 
 hope that this experiment will succeed, the work- 
 men, whom I do not choose to call laborers, will 
 meet you gentlemen half way, as you have met 
 us.'" 
 
 Such were Mr. Holmes's views as to the 
 "Christian relations between capital and labor."
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE PLAN. 
 
 n^HE arrangements by which the Hampton 
 Mills were set running were, indeed, sub- 
 stantially those on which they have been run 
 from that day to this day. An act of incorpora- 
 tion was taken out, on the principle of limited 
 liability, under the general corporation law of 
 that state. This act originated, as all similar 
 legislation in the world originated, in the act 
 framed by Mr. Theodore Hinsdale in Connecti- 
 cut, in the year 1837. It was an act and he a 
 man to be celebrated and honored by all who 
 believe in Christian Co-operation, and think that 
 the law should sustain and protect all who v/ish 
 to bear each other's burdens. 
 
 I will not print the act of incorporation here ; 
 for I shall make the plan more intelligible by 
 copying the original agreement, as it was drawn 
 up by Nourse, Spinner and Workman. Event- 
 ually, Spinner and Workman printed this agree- 
 ment, and kept copies of it in the office, to give 
 away to people like me, who came to see the 
 operation of the mills.
 
 THE PLAN. 25 
 
 Hampton Woollen Mill. 
 
 Thankful Nourse of Arcadia, John Workman 
 of Hopedale, and WilHam Spinner of Crastis 
 agree to form a corporation for the re-estabUsh- 
 ment of the Hampton Woollen Mills in the 
 town of Hampton. This agreement is to last 
 for five years, and afterwards, until one of these 
 three parties expresses a wish to withdraw, when 
 the partnership shall be dissolved, and the cor- 
 poration, at the end of one year's notice given 
 by the dissatisfied partner. 
 
 [In fact, neither of them wished to withdraw 
 at the end of five years. And a private agree- 
 ment by which they were bound to each other 
 to consent to such withdrawal was, at the end 
 of five years, cancelled by the three. Either of 
 them now has the right to sell his stock, and on 
 the death of either of the managing partners, 
 the surviving shareholders would choose his 
 successor.] 
 
 I. Thankful Nourse, for himself, his heirs 
 and representatives, agrees to furnish as re- 
 quired seventy-two thousand five hundred dol- 
 lars for the purchase and repairs of the property 
 known as the Hampton Mills, and for carrying 
 on the manufacture of woollen cloth under the 
 management of the said Workman and Spinner, 
 already named.
 
 26 iu)\v Tm:Y lived in hampton. 
 
 2. John Workman of the second part agrees 
 to furnish five hundred dollars for the same pur- 
 pose. 
 
 3. William Spinner of the third part agrees 
 to furnish two thousand dollars for the same 
 purpose. 
 
 The sum of seventy-five thousand dollars thus 
 contributed is to be the capital stock of the en- 
 terprise, and when capital is spoken of in this 
 agreement, the sum now named, of seventy-five 
 thousand dollars, is meant. 
 
 John Workman and William Spinner, of the 
 second and third part of this agreement, agree 
 to give all their time and skill to the manufac- 
 ture of woollen goods at the said Hampton Mills ; 
 — they are to choose the workmen and appoint 
 the foremen, and direct the manufacture. They 
 are to buy the wool and other necessary mate- 
 rial ; they are to sell the manufactured goods for 
 the best advantage of the concern. Acting as 
 the firm of " Spinner & Workman," they are 
 to have the control of the mill as entirely as if 
 they had leased it from the corporation. They 
 do this for the benefit of all parties concerned, 
 as is hereinafter described. 
 
 It is understood and covenanted that the mill 
 is to be carried on with the intention that the 
 profits are to be divided between the owners, 
 the two managers, and the workmen employed
 
 THE PLAN. 27 
 
 by them ; — that one-third of the profits shall be 
 paid to the owners, one-third to managers, and 
 one-third to workmen. 
 
 In the estimate of profits for such division, it 
 is agreed that there shall have been first paid as 
 necessary expenses, — 
 
 1. Four per cent on the sum of $75,000 to 
 the owners. 
 
 2. Six hundred dollars a year to each manager. 
 
 3. To each workman as may be agreed with 
 him, but on a scale of wages intended to repre- 
 sent three-fourths of the current rate of wages 
 in his line. 
 
 4. If the mills do not earn four per cent, 
 after paying the other expenses, the owners 
 shall receive only the amount which it does 
 earn. 
 
 It is further agreed between the said Thank- 
 ful Nourse of the first part and the said Spinner 
 and Workman of the second and third parts of 
 this agreement, that, for the needs of the mill 
 in carrying forward this enterprise, if said Spin- 
 ner and Workman find it necessary to give their 
 notes for discount at any time, the said Thank- 
 ful Nourse, or his agents for him, will indorse 
 those notes to the amount of thirty thousand 
 dollars and no more. And the said Spinner 
 and Workman shall have no power to contract 
 other debts chargeable to the corporation, except
 
 28 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 for advances on goods manufactured. The ac- 
 counts of the firm and of the corporation shall 
 be accurately kept, and at all times open to ex- 
 amination by either of these parties or by any 
 stockholder, or any person commissioned by 
 one-third of the workmen in the mill, who are 
 to be regarded as having the rights of partners 
 in the concern. 
 
 A balance-sheet shall be prepared at the end 
 of every half-year to show the profit or loss of 
 the mills in the last six months. 
 
 If any balance of profit appears, after the ex- 
 penses above provided for have been met, the 
 owners representing capital as above described 
 shall receive two per cent semi-annually on their 
 stock invested. 
 
 The remaining profits shall be credited in 
 three equal portions but shall not be drawn for 
 division till the end of two years. 
 
 One-third shall be paid to capital as above 
 described. 
 
 One-third shall be paid to the managers. 
 
 One-third shall be paid to the workmen, — to 
 be divided in the proportion of the wages which 
 they have already received. In the event of the 
 death of any workman, or of his leaving the 
 mill, his representative in Hampton shall re- 
 ceive his share of the profits, as if he remained 
 in the employ of the corporation.
 
 THE PLAN. 29 
 
 At the end of five years the mills shall be 
 sold for the benefit of all concerned, and the 
 profit, if any, shall be divided among all con- 
 cerned, on the same basis as that described for 
 the division of the semi-annual profits. 
 
 [At the end of five years the enterprise was 
 so successful that this part of the agreement 
 was cancelled by all concerned.] 
 
 The part of the transaction which Spinner 
 knew was difficult, and which Nourse thought 
 was impossible, was the persuading a sufficient 
 number of workmen to take hold on such terms 
 as those described. But John Workman had 
 always, after he had once enlisted, felt sure 
 that that part could be brought about. He 
 belonged, in particular, to a workingmen's club 
 which had often discussed such subjects. The 
 men were good fellows who did not believe that 
 "the other fellow" in a bargain was to have 
 nothing. They had loyally tried to work out 
 the question of wages on the same plan which 
 should not involve "knocking down and drag- 
 ging out." Here was a plan with money 
 behind it. On the other hand there was noth- 
 ing. The Andalusia, where most of them had 
 worked, was bankrupt. Men were really trudg- 
 ing about on foot, seeking chances as weavers 
 and dyers, and there were no such chances. 
 
 What was offered was almost starvation wages,
 
 30 now TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON, 
 
 but there was no sham about it. And every 
 man was sure of a chance for success. Every 
 man was compelled to invest for two years the 
 remaining quarter of his income, which was not 
 paid him. 
 
 Workman was able to offer his tenement 
 houses at fabulously low rates, for the new 
 company bought them with the rest of the 
 abandoned property. And, from the begin- 
 ning, Workman and Spinner agreed that the 
 money of the company was to be made in 
 manufacturing. It was not to be made out of 
 rents or stores or the improvement of real 
 estate in Hampton. The tenement houses 
 were valued at an appraisement, and stood at 
 very low charge on the books. Workman said, 
 therefore, that he would rent them for four per 
 cent, — what had been called in joke "the idiot's 
 dividend," and nothing more. This gave each 
 hand a considerable advantage at the first, 
 because he was a partner very soon, even at 
 "starvation wages." The men began to buy 
 their houses from the corporation on low rates 
 and terms which will appear in another chapter. 
 
 Among Workman's friends there were sev- 
 eral enthusiasts, each of whom undertook to 
 engage ten or twelve hands in the departments 
 needed. Much discussion pro and con went 
 forward. At the last there was much shrink-
 
 THE PLAN. 31 
 
 ing of wives from the proposed removal. On 
 the other hand, there were some people who 
 had been wrecked in the original failure at 
 Hampton. They were all too eager to take 
 hold, if in any way they might. Some of them 
 proved very good people for the purpose. Most 
 of them were the people who would not have 
 succeeded anywhere. By such means the hands 
 were got together, and the mill began to con- 
 vert wool into woollens.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE RESULTS. 
 
 SUCH was the history of the new start of 
 Hampton, and the plan on which the sev- 
 eral adventures were formed. It is clear enough 
 that if they had not been bound together by 
 other ties than those of mere business, as it is 
 called, the enterprise would never have suc- 
 ceeded as it did, — indeed, it would never have 
 been. But they were united more closely. 
 Every one of the leaders believed that, in the 
 true order of society — the order which the Sav- 
 iour of man lived and died to establish — there 
 was a right way to do whatever the world needed 
 done. They believed, therefore, that there was 
 a right way to make woollen cloth, if only they 
 could find out what it was. They meant to find 
 it out, they were not afraid to ask God's bless- 
 ing on that endeavor, nor to say to each other 
 that they had asked it. With notions and aims 
 as high as these, Mr. Spinner had carried his 
 plan, not now conceived for the first time, to 
 Mr. Nourse. 
 
 He, too, had made the whole subject a matter
 
 THE RESULTS. 33 
 
 of most serious inquiry. He had no wish to 
 grow rich from the results of other men's in- 
 dustry, unless they, in their places, had a chance 
 to prosper also. He knew, however, that manu- 
 facturing enterprise or mercantile adventure 
 have their laws, as absolute as those of rain- 
 fall or of tide-waves. He knew that, as he 
 could not overpower those laws, more than 
 King Canute could resist the flowing sea, what- 
 ever his wealth and power, he could not, on the 
 other hand, withstand them by any degree of 
 sentiment or tenderness. He knew that the 
 laws of trade and of social order must be studied, 
 and that allowance must be made for them. Mr. 
 Workman, and Mr. Spinner as well, wanted to 
 see the right thing done. They were both as 
 proud that they were not born with silver spoons 
 in their mouths, as was ever any prince that he 
 was cradled in purple. They were in no sort 
 beggars for a change of position. They were 
 workmen, and good workmen ; they had been 
 trained to their craft, and knew how to do their 
 work. What they wanted was, that the share 
 which they contributed in the clothing of the 
 world should be as cordially recognized as every 
 other man's share. They knew that many others 
 had a share in it, — capitalist, wool-grower, trans- 
 porter, merchant, tailor, and stitching-girl. They 
 believed that a fair division could be made some-
 
 34 HOW TIIEY LIVED I\ HAMPTON. 
 
 how, which should recognize how much each of 
 these parties fairly earned and deserved to have. 
 This they wanted for themselves and their asso- 
 ciates. They asked for no more. But they 
 were satisfied with nothing less. Had any one 
 asked either of these men for charity, he would 
 have received what he asked for promptly. For 
 they all understood what the word " charity " 
 means, and acknowledged the obligation it de- 
 scribes. But all of them knew that the relations 
 between capital, which provided tools and mate- 
 rials and work, which uses tools to manufacture 
 materials, should not be relations of sentiment, 
 or of charity, or of force. They should be rela- 
 tions founded on the eternal laws of God. And, 
 as all of them were Christian men, they believed 
 that these laws were revealed in the Gospel. 
 
 Recognizing, then, that for making woollen 
 cloth, and bringing it to a fit market, three co- 
 adjutors were necessary, — capital, work, and 
 the directing skill which should enable capital 
 to use the workman's industry ; they agreed 
 that these three agencies should share equally 
 in the profit of the article produced. The reader 
 has seen the simple plan which they adopted. 
 
 It worked better than they had dared to 
 hope. For the first seven months, indeed, af- 
 ter the machinery had been renewed, the mills 
 repaired, and the new system set going, they
 
 THE RESULTS. 35 
 
 had up-hill work. The market was flooded 
 with the stock of bankrupt concerns, forced 
 upon buyers by the assignees and creditors. 
 Never, Spinner told me, had prices sunk so 
 low, and never had the world looked so blackly 
 on such adventure. But he had never given 
 up his conviction, that the world must have 
 warm clothing, — at least in the zones which 
 were north of ten degrees of Northern Lati- 
 tude. He kept on making cloth, — better and 
 better, he said, — as he was able to test his 
 machinery and to train his hands, without over- 
 working them. He knew, he said, to a quarter 
 of a cent, what his cloth cost him. He was 
 not yet obliged to sell a yard beneath that 
 cost. He did sell a little at a very small ad- 
 vance upon it. And he piled up a good deal, 
 waiting for a rise. After seven months, the 
 flood came. It wavered at first, and then 
 poured in, cheerfully and hopefully. Some 
 jobbers, who had taken a little of his cloth 
 on commission, had received very flattering 
 orders for more, amounting almost to carte- 
 blanche for price ; so sound had the goods 
 proved, and so well had the tailors been 
 pleased who had used them. He was glad 
 that he had insisted that the voyage should 
 be a two years' voyage. But he began now 
 to post very encouraging bulletins on his news-
 
 36 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 boards. He would not make goods by caucus, 
 he said. But he did mean that men and boys 
 should know which way the stream was run- 
 ning which carried the fortunes of them all. 
 
 He had, therefore, a regular habit of placing 
 on his bulletin board such correspondence or 
 other news as he thought the hands would be 
 glad to read. I saved one or two of the old 
 bulletins which he gave to me. 
 
 No. 23. 
 
 " Extract from a letter from New York : — 
 From Mercer and Goodenough, this despatch 
 is just received. Sold all A. A. at four eighths 
 advance. Order for twice as much." 
 
 For a considerable time after the mill began 
 to run, they felt the worth of the new power 
 enlisted. People were living very economical- 
 ly, because they had only three-quarters of the 
 wages they were used to. But every one of 
 these same people had been living more eco- 
 nomically, because they had no wages. That 
 was undoubtedly a good stepping-stone for the 
 new plan. After the beginning, however, there 
 came a period of terrible depression of feeling. 
 The absolute failure to sell any goods reacted 
 on the men employed. They were used to 
 receiving their pay without any great thought
 
 THE RESULTS. 37 
 
 of the run of trade which supplied it. But to 
 meet Mr. Spinner when he came back from 
 New York, or to hear him talk, if he would 
 talk, after he had received his mail, and to 
 know that absolutely no money had come into 
 the concern, — this dismayed men who knew, 
 of course, that the thing could not run on 
 forever on Mr. Nourse's original investment. 
 They felt the reflection of the depression in 
 the market, more, probably, than he would have 
 done. This was the real "Slough of Despond" 
 of the enterprise. Spinner spoke to me of it, 
 and described it with a sort of shudder. And 
 afterward Holmes and Dyer and Sheridan and 
 Workman, — indeed, all of the older hands with 
 whom I talked, spoke of it, and with bated 
 breath, as if they hoped they might never 
 have to go through such an experience again. 
 
 " But this I have noticed, Mr. Freeman," said 
 Holmes to me, " unless a man pulls through his 
 Slough of Despond in any undertaking, he is no 
 good. And I say that a woollen mill must live 
 the life of a man. Anyhow, we went through 
 it. It was a good lesson for every one of us 
 who v.'as in it. 
 
 " We had a revival meeting, if you will let 
 me call it so, about when things were at their 
 worst. No, I do not mean what I suppose you 
 might call a religious revival, but there was a
 
 38 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 good deal of religion in it, and, if there had 
 not been, you and I would not be talking here. 
 Almost all tlie leaders spoke. These gentle- 
 men you know, all spoke. And they put it to 
 the hands, as you might speak to the men in a 
 sinking ship, if you were encouraging them to 
 pump. But they put it man-fashion. They 
 made the simplest wool-picker there under- 
 stand that if he deserted the ship he was play- 
 ing false to every man and every woman in 
 the land, who was hoping for better times, bet- 
 ter wages, and a better system. I know I told 
 the men to go home and pray God to help to 
 carry it through. I know I took my own ad- 
 vice, and I think others did. 
 
 " That meeting was the crisis. One or two 
 fellows left us, — 'for their country's good.' 
 But there was no grumbling after that, and 
 even the work of the mill seemed to be bet- 
 ter, and I know Workman said the same thing. 
 It was some weeks before the business situation 
 of the country seemed better. But we felt bet- 
 ter as soon as we openly recognized the difB- 
 culty we were in, — well, and, so to speak, 
 pledged ourselves to each other. Up to that 
 time, we had all been prophesying success, — • 
 'smooth things,' as I said last night. When 
 that meeting came, we owned that the whole 
 voyage was not a summer sail, and that every
 
 THE RESULTS. 39 
 
 man had got to put his shoulder to the wheel, 
 if we were to go through ; — yes, and to pray 
 God to help him. That is the reason why I 
 say that we never really prospered till we had 
 gone through the 'Slough of Despond.'" 
 
 It was not the Slough of Despond, but the 
 reason of the thing, which induced Spinner 
 and Workman, with Mr. Nourse's approval, to 
 yield from the rigor of the original plan, which 
 had demanded what Spinner had called "a two 
 years' voyage." At the end of the first quarter 
 of the second year the thing was well estab- 
 lished, and in working order. Spinner had a 
 large offer made him in New York for all the 
 goods he had been piling up, and, though the 
 market was probably still to rise, he determined 
 not to bet on the possibility, but sold out for 
 cash, so as to clear all his warehouses. And 
 Spinner said to me that, on the whole, in his 
 administration, he had gone on the principle 
 that they were manufacturers and not specula- 
 tors. " If I could sell our goods for what it 
 cost us to make them, with a fair profit, and a 
 fair margin to cover the losses on sales I was 
 sometimes forced to make, because I needed 
 money, — why, I thought I had better sell. 
 I do not mean I had no right to hold on. 
 Probably I had such a right. But I do not 
 think the right is the same, when I am the
 
 40 lUnV THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 manager, as I am here, for a hundred or two 
 people who arc joint owners in the goods, as it 
 would be, — say, were I the owner of the An- 
 dalusia, and owned all the goods myself. Now 
 I am a trustee. Then I should be an owner." 
 
 I took to heart what he said. And as I 
 looked over his books one day, I could see the 
 advantages the concern had derived from his 
 rule. It need not be said that the public 
 gained a similar advantage. It is undoubtedly 
 for the advantage of the public that prices 
 should not change by sudden leaps, and that 
 the movements of trade shall not be affected 
 by what are rightly called speculative plans. 
 The co-operators of Hampton did not, I sup- 
 pose, consider this advantage in making up 
 their system. But it was one of the many 
 points in which they builded better than they 
 knew. 
 
 Acting upon this policy, Mr. Spinner emptied 
 his storehouses, and, as he sold for cash on 
 very short credit, he had money in hand. Why 
 should the first voyage be a two years' voyage } 
 They were already in port. He was able to de- 
 clare his first dividend. Probably no person but 
 himself and Workman had believed it would 
 come out so well. They had made few losses, 
 — nothing, indeed, of considerable account. 
 And when the shares came to be divided
 
 THE RESULTS. 4I 
 
 among all hands it proved that, though so late 
 a payment, it was large enough to compensate 
 every one for the waiting. 
 
 " My deary," said the old woman who washed 
 the windows, when Spinner paid her first 
 money-dividend to her, " if I had had the 
 money, I should have spent it." And her 
 simple confession was doubtless true with a 
 great many more of these shareholders, whose 
 investment in work had been larger than hers. 
 
 From that time till the period of my visit the 
 quarterly balance-sheet had been printed for 
 the use of the workmen. It was theirs as 
 much as it was Mr. Nourse's. They were his 
 partners and knew they were, and by no senti- 
 mental statement merely. Gradually they came 
 to use the language of owners : " We shall do 
 this ; " " We shall do that ; " " We made a mis- 
 take in running so long on such a pattern ; " 
 " We made a good thing of this." From the 
 beginning they felt the need of avoiding waste. 
 "There is not a mill on this stream but uses 
 twice as much oil as I do ; " that was the boast 
 which a young man made to me, who met the 
 requisitions of the different rooms for the oil of 
 their machinery. 
 
 Spinner and Workman, in giving me the 
 accounts which I have digested in these chap- 
 ters, both spoke as if they were going back to
 
 42 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 a time far distant. In point of fact, the estab- 
 lishment at Hampton was made only seven years 
 before. But they had seen so rapid a develop- 
 ment since their original timid plans, that they 
 found it difficult sometimes to carry themselves 
 to those antediluvian days. More than once 
 Spinner came to me, after he had narrated 
 something, to say that, on recurring to his 
 notes on his memory, he found that he had 
 antedated or postdated occurrences, and that 
 he wanted to correct his original statement ; 
 for they both knew that I was making memo- 
 randa, and that I wished to draw up some such 
 statement as I am making now. 
 
 At the time I visited them the whole estab- 
 lishment was running on as steadily as any 
 manufacturing town in the country. A con- 
 siderable part of Thankful Nourse's share in the 
 capital had been taken off his hands by pur- 
 chase from different heads of rooms, and, in 
 one or two instances, by the widows of former 
 workmen, who wished to remain in the place 
 themselves, and liked to feel that they owned a 
 part of the plant. "Corporation is co-operation" 
 — this was a favorite saw of Spinner, Workman, 
 and of a man named Holmes, of whom I have 
 spoken, and shall have occasion to speak again. 
 
 I copy one of their balance sheets to show 
 its form.
 
 THE RESULTS. 43 
 
 No. 37. 
 Hampton Mills Balance Sheet for Six Months. 
 
 Cr. 
 
 By sales of manufactured goods, after commis- 
 sions and expenses have been deducted . $167,892 II 
 
 Dr. 
 
 To amount work of operatives . $15,297 14 
 
 To amount paid salaries. Work- 
 man and Spinner .... 300 00 
 
 For repairs (macliinery and mill ) 6,981 12 
 
 Wool and supplies 111,291 14 
 
 Interest paid to Thankful Nourse, 
 
 Esq., and to Workman and 
 
 Spinner 1,500 00 
 
 Balance of profit to be divided . 38,522 71 
 
 $167,892 II 
 
 At the very beginning, the works had gone 
 through their share of the difficulties of a begin- 
 ning. After that slough of despond which has 
 been described to the reader, there had come 
 along heavy depression of business, which had 
 very severely tried the temper of all these men, 
 and which they thought might try the sympathies 
 and steadiness of their friend Thankful Nourse. 
 I believe, myself, that they quite misapprehended 
 him in this impression. I did not say so to them, 
 but I am quite willing to say here, that I think 
 Mr. Nourse had had quite too much experience
 
 44 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 in business to suppose that there were to be 
 years of plenty without years of famine follow- 
 ing them. I do not believe that in New Zea- 
 land, or Boothia Felix, or Novgorod, or the 
 Malayan Islands, or wherever his wandering 
 disposition had carried him, he gave one anx- 
 ious thought to the investment he had made 
 at Hampton. I suppose that, like most other 
 capitalists, who have their passions under con- 
 trol, — or, why should I not say frankly, who 
 are religious men .'' — he was willing to take the 
 better and the worse together, and to submit 
 with modesty and with loyalty to what he would 
 frankly have called the "providence of God." 
 I knew Nourse at one time very well, and I re- 
 member that one of his favorite axioms, borrowed 
 from Mr. Carlyle, was, " There was no act of 
 Parliament that I should be happy." And he 
 would apply this axiom in a dozen different 
 ways. He would say, there was no act of Par- 
 liament that the Andalusia should declare ten 
 per cent ; there was no act of Parliament that 
 Mr. Hayes should receive two-thirds of the 
 votes for president ; there was no act of Parli- 
 ament that the Britannia should arrive after a 
 nine days' passage. In other words, he was 
 willing to live in God's world, subject to some 
 orders besides his own, and was not in the 
 habit of complaining, because in any one year
 
 THE RESULTS. 45 
 
 or two years, things did not turn out as he 
 would have them turn out. 
 
 He had not said so to Spinner in his negotia- 
 tions with Spinner, but all the same he had not 
 come to the determination to invest in this tri- 
 partite arrangement, without solitary thought 
 and without prayer. He believed that he had 
 done the right thing in investing his money as 
 he had done, although he had done a thing 
 wholly new. Having come to this determina- 
 tion, having asked God's help in making this de- 
 termination, he held to this determination. If 
 anybody had spoken to him about it, he would 
 have been seriously annoyed ; but, if it were a 
 person to whom he thought he must make an 
 answer, — as, for instance, to his wife, possibly to 
 an old friend like me, — he would have said, 
 probably, " I have put my hand to the plough, 
 and I do not propose to turn back." 
 
 He would have meant that he regarded the 
 capital given to him as given to him in trust to 
 use for the best purposes. He had tried to use 
 it for the best purposes when he made this dis- 
 posal of it, and he would not worry himself, 
 week by week, or month by month, or even 
 year by year, in attending to the details. He 
 would not dig up the tree which he had 
 intentionally planted for a certain purpose 
 in his lawn, because, at the end of the
 
 46 HOW TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 second year or the third year, he thought 
 that the tree was not rooting itself properly. 
 
 So much for the difficulties of the enterprise 
 as they effected capital. They were not so 
 great as Spinner and Workman fancied they 
 were. To neither Spinner nor Workman could 
 Mr. Nourse say all I did, nor were they accus- 
 tomed to look at it from the point of view 
 which is, I am sure, the true one. 
 
 In another chapter I will show more at 
 length than is worth while here, the experi- 
 ences these two gentlemen themselves had. 
 They were occupying a position which ap- 
 peared to be somewhat new. They were sub- 
 ject to a great deal of criticism from the men 
 whom they were a little apt to call "sea-law- 
 yers," although they had never been to sea. 
 They borrowed this phrase from the sailors 
 whom they knew very well in earlier life, who 
 use it as an expression of contempt, by which 
 they describe the men who are forever inciting 
 sailors to mutinous or disrespectful thoughts of 
 their employers, while they are not themselves 
 good seamen. There are such men in all indus- 
 tries, whether they go to sea or not. I have no 
 doubt that Spinner and Workman both despised 
 them, but still such critics had it in their power 
 to make them very unhappy. Such critics were 
 constantly trying to make the hands think that
 
 THE RESULTS. 4/ 
 
 Workman and Spinner overestimated them- 
 selves, — took airs upon themselves, — and, 
 when dividends were made, took more than 
 they had earned. The phrase, which Spinner 
 had himself used when he said that he was to 
 be a buffer between two cars and, if he could, 
 ameliorate the shock, seemed a very pat one to 
 describe the misfortunes which belong to the 
 midway position. Workman said to me one 
 day, half laughing, that he thought they would 
 have fared better if there had been an old es- 
 tablished name by which they could be called. 
 In point of fact, they were called " managers " 
 of the mill, and the dividend paid to them 
 was the dividend paid to "management." He 
 showed me a little treatise on the subject, 
 written by I do not know whom, which said 
 that in France the man would be called the 
 entrepreneur, meaning the person who took hold 
 between one end and the other. We have the 
 same root in our word " enterprise," and Work- 
 man said he was tempted to call himself an 
 " enterpriser," and he wished that somebody 
 had invented such a word two hundred years 
 ago. He said, if it could be understood when 
 they were spoken of, that the whole thing ex- 
 isted because they were there, it would be bet- 
 ter for them both, and he felt that if some good 
 word could express this every time they were
 
 48 HOW THKY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 spoken of it would be a good thing. " Now," 
 he said, " the word ' manager ' has in itself not 
 a bad sound, but when we speak of managing a 
 thing, we sometimes imply that we are manag- 
 ing it in an underhand way. It is not always 
 so. I believe nobody thinks the ' manager ' of 
 a theatre is necessarily a mean man ; but the 
 moment we speak of a ' political manager,' we 
 have the idea of a trick. I could wish, there- 
 fore," he said, "that we were not called the 
 management, but we are, and we have to bear 
 our burden as well as we can." 
 
 Nor were the workmen free from their share 
 of annoyances. On the whole, the body cor- 
 porate of Hampton sloughed off the inferior 
 and dissatisfied people. The management was 
 strong enough, and their friends were strong 
 enough, to say squarely to the sea-lawyers and 
 other such that if they did not like to stay at 
 Hampton there was no act of Parliament by 
 which they need stay there. 
 
 They could be dismissed, at very short notice, 
 from the mills ; and I was amused to find that 
 this democratic management was very much 
 more peremptory in such dismissals than were 
 the directors of many a manufacturing estab- 
 lishment which I had seen before, who were, 
 to a large extent, afraid of irritating or wound- 
 ing the feelings of their hands. There was
 
 THE RESULTS. 49 
 
 no reason for any such fear in this case, be- 
 cause the hands were, practically, with the 
 management, the directors of the whole con- 
 cern. On the whole, as I say, the hands 
 were loyal to the plan. They were more and 
 more interested in the plan. It cultivated their 
 self-respect, and, as the reader has been told, 
 it proved profitable to them. But none the 
 less were they subject to invasions from com- 
 mittees of inspection and committees of various 
 delegates from county conventions, from " Fed- 
 erations of Toilers," from " Organizations of In- 
 dustry," from "Unions of Handicraft," and from 
 various other organizations which had much more 
 picturesque and mediaeval names. And these 
 delegates either had some " wrong," showing 
 that they were offended by the somewhat inde- 
 pendent attitude of Hampton, or they had some 
 new plan for the coming of the kingdom of 
 heaven which they wanted to propose to the 
 Hampton workmen. Now the Hampton work- 
 men were, in fact, the most democratic set of 
 people in the world. They were not proud, 
 they appreciated good-fellowship and camarad- 
 erie as much as any men did ; but they were 
 beginning to own their own mill, they did have 
 a third part of the profits of it, they wanted it 
 to succeed, and they wanted it to succeed in 
 their own way. They disliked to be lectured
 
 50 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 about the ct)ncluct of their business as much as 
 any purse-proud capitaHst in Lynn or in Ger- 
 mantown dishkes to be lectured about his. Still 
 it was not a nice thing, it was not an agreeable 
 thing, to be placarded in all the workmen's jour- 
 nals of the country as being only a mitigated set 
 of scabs, or as being pretenders in wolves' cloth- 
 ing, or as being people who, having got a snug 
 thing themselves, were trying to kick down the 
 ladder by which they had risen. All the same, 
 they had this burden to bear ; and it was among 
 the difficulties of the earlier days at Hampton. 
 
 It is better to speak of all those difficulties to- 
 gether, than to attempt to convey, in any his- 
 torical narrative, the way in which they played 
 in with each other, antagonized each other, and, 
 at the same time, corrected each other. Gradu- 
 ally everybody, probably, came to feel that, to 
 borrow Mr. Nourse's maxim, there was no act 
 of Parliament that Hampton should go on 
 without its rubs and periods of starvation. On 
 the w^hole, it had become more and more a fixed 
 institution, with its own traditions, — and that 
 is a matter of great importance, — with its own 
 habits, which sprung from these traditions, — 
 and with that success which belongs alike to 
 established traditions and established habits. 
 
 To sum up, under a few general heads, the 
 more remarkable of these successes, I think I
 
 THE RESULTS. 5 I 
 
 should say, first of all, that the system had 
 brought in and kept in a very superior set of 
 workmen and workwomen. There were not so 
 many women engaged as there would generally 
 have been in a mill of the size, and, as will be 
 seen in another chapter, there were very few 
 children engaged. But I knew enough of the 
 woollen manufacture to know that the intelli- 
 gence, quickness, promptness, and effectiveness 
 of the slowest and poorest hands in any room 
 was well up to the standard of the better half of 
 the workmen or workwomen who would have 
 been engaged in the same room in an ordinary 
 establishment. I spoke to Spinner about this, 
 and he said I was certainly right. He said he 
 had thought of it a great deal ; he at one time 
 tried to put in figures some statement of the 
 advantage which they derived from the clear and 
 undoubted superiority of their work-people. He 
 had not found it possible to make any tabular 
 or distinctive statement. " But it amounts to 
 this," he said. "They are all determined that 
 this thing shall succeed ; they are determined 
 the cloth shall be good, and shall maintain the 
 reputation that it has in the market. If there 
 is any new style, if there is a bit of new ma- 
 chinery, if there is a new fad about dyeing, — no 
 matter what it is, it is a thing that interests them 
 as much as a new baby interests the people in
 
 52 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 the house where it is born. They pet the baby 
 and cuddle it and do everything they can to 
 make the new plan prove satisfactory." In the 
 long run, this is evidently so. I am disposed to 
 think it springs from self-respect quite as much 
 as from self-interest, to which it might ordinarily 
 be ascribed, and it is of great value in any work. 
 And when you come to any change, — when one 
 of the heads of a room, for instance, finds it for 
 his advantage to take a higher place in some 
 other mill, when you want to promote somebody 
 to the vacant position, you find that the people 
 who have been faithful in few things are really 
 able to be masters of many things, and that you 
 can promote them without difficulty, and with- 
 out injury to the running of your organism. 
 
 I am not quite sure whether I am right, but 
 the saving of material proved also to be very 
 considerable. Even in such a detail as this of 
 oil, which is a very considerable charge in a wool- 
 len mill, the young men who had the care of the 
 oil-room were so careful that, very early in the 
 affair. Workman and Spinner found that these 
 fellows had driven up the others to care, amount- 
 ing almost to parsimony, indeed, which involved 
 very considerable reduction. Among the papers 
 which I brought away, as memorials of my visit, 
 is a little printed bulletin, numbered 13, which 
 is a boast that, in the four weeks preceding,
 
 THE RESULTS. 53 
 
 seventy-three gallons of oil had been saved com- 
 pared with the expenditure in the corresponding 
 four weeks in the preceding year. In the reduc- 
 tion of the amount of wool used, Workman 
 himself acknowledged to me that he had been 
 surprised. They told me that, at the begin- 
 ning, it was not infrequent to find that, with 
 the same number of yards completed, one per 
 cent of wool had been saved in a single week. 
 Of course such improvement as this could not 
 go on forever. But it hardly ever happened 
 that the hands relaxed the care to which they 
 were trained, partly by self-interest, partly by 
 loyalty, and partly indeed, by pride. They 
 entered into the feeling of an old-fashioned 
 housekeeper, who hates to see things thrown 
 away. She even wants her children to eat 
 after their hunger is satisfied, because she does 
 not like to have anything left on the plate. 
 Everybody in every department of these mills 
 had that same unwillingness to see anything 
 lost which might have been made useful. In 
 another chapter, I will describe at some length 
 the pride which I found all the leaders of the 
 system taking in the young life of their vil- 
 lage. Seven years had changed the boys and 
 girls of ten into young men and women of 
 seventeen, — the most miraculous change which 
 takes place in human life. It required no hint
 
 54 "OW TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 from those who were most interested, to make 
 me see that these young men and maidens were 
 people of a type quite different from the young 
 people of their age whom one would find in 
 a manufacturing town, where everything had 
 been neglected, and where no central power 
 was trying to bring out the very best training 
 for the young, and to surround them with the 
 most cheerful and happy influences: 
 
 Without going farther into such details, it may 
 be said that nothing is so successful as success. 
 The financial success of Hampton appears to 
 me, now that I am looking back upon the whole, 
 as the least interesting and the least impor- 
 tant feature in its administration and in its his- 
 tory. I shall hardly be believed, but I think 
 that four out of five, nay, perhaps that all of 
 the leading members of the community would 
 say, that they have ceased to think of the finan- 
 cial success as being the first matter which they 
 considered. They found themselves in a place 
 where there was no longer any irritation in the 
 discharge of their daily duty. Everybody knew 
 he was justly treated. There was no longer that 
 angry question why things were not otherwise, 
 w^hich, under other circumstances, would have 
 embittered the first waking at morning, would 
 have embittered every morsel of food, would 
 have embittered the hour when he retired to bed
 
 THE RESULTS. 55 
 
 at night. This was all gone. Whether the thing 
 succeeded or not, the tiling was fair, and this 
 sense of fairness gave an evenness to people's 
 lives which the older members of the commu- 
 nity knew how to value. Next to this, I should 
 say that there was a certain enlargement of life, 
 which they could hardly define themselves, per- 
 haps, and perhaps did not compare with the 
 somewhat limited range of the life of people, who 
 were taking care of themselves and taking care 
 of none beside. These people were living, not 
 a mere personal life, but in the life of the com- 
 munity. They had all common interests, and 
 these interests were really large interests. To 
 be taken out of themselves, — to be thinking of 
 something better than their own headaches and 
 heartaches, — this was in itself an advantage 
 which, whether they knew how to state it in 
 words or not, affected every hour of every day. 
 
 The great essential of all society is, that the 
 lines of promotion be kept open. A man can 
 bear even a very hard life, if he has reason to 
 think that next week something is going to open 
 before him which will enable him to throw off 
 this or that discomfort of to-day. On the other 
 hand, a man will chafe in a very prosperous life, 
 if you tell him that, by any fatality, he must live 
 on with that machinery, in that habit, eating 
 that food, and doing that work forever. Open
 
 56 now TIIKV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 promotion is the central word for American so- 
 ciety and American life. This open promotion 
 was the privilege of every man and woman, boy 
 and girl, in Hampton. It might not come very 
 soon, but every one knew that it was ready and 
 possible. It will be shown in another chapter 
 that the boys and girls were by no means chained 
 or constrained to a future in which they should 
 be operatives in a woollen factory, their life long. 
 Already there were instances where the young 
 people who had this taste or that gift, leading 
 them into other occupations, had followed those 
 tastes or used those gifts. Nobody felt com- 
 pelled, by the law of the instrument, to accept 
 one position or another. There was, on the 
 other hand, that openness of choice which seems 
 to be the requisite of any happy life. 
 
 This is a poor enough statement of details, 
 and a poor enough effort to analyze the prosper- 
 ity of a successful community. Perhaps it would 
 have been as well to say that these people had, on 
 the whole, tried to meet the duties which came to 
 them, as Christian men and women. They had 
 done their best, on the whole, to carry out the 
 Christian law of love ; they certainly were living 
 daily with the loyal hope that the future was to 
 be even better than the present ; and this love 
 and this faith were based on an abiding faith in 
 God, whose law they were trying to obey. I am
 
 THE RESULTS. $7 
 
 not sure that I heard any man say so while I was 
 in Hampton, but when I look back upon their 
 life, or what people are pleased to call their 
 experiment, it does not seem to me that that 
 experiment was so hazardous, for I always re- 
 member who said that, if any community of 
 brethren would trust first the kingdom of God 
 and His righteousness, all the little things of 
 time, for which petty men are selfishly anxious, 
 will certainly be added to the endeavor of that 
 community.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE STORE. 
 
 I DID not like to hang about the counting- 
 room for an unreasonable length of time, and 
 yet I was so much interested in what I saw at 
 Hampton that I did not abridge my visit. As 
 I have intimated, I could occupy myself in the 
 woods and by the brooks, but I also found that 
 I became acquainted among the workmen and 
 their wives and children ; and bearing in mind all 
 along the object of my visit, I followed up such 
 acquaintances. Travelling as long as I had been, 
 there was one and another matter which I wanted 
 to refit in my little luggage, and so I went into 
 the "store" once and again for my purchases. 
 It is the standing miracle of a place like this, 
 when it is well kept, that the clerk is able to 
 supply you with everything you need, from a 
 heron's wing to a hand-saw. I found that they 
 could fit my watch with a new crystal just as 
 readily as I found that they could sell me hooks 
 and flies of the last London patterns. Some- 
 times the store was wholly empty, and I was 
 the only customer. Sometimes, on the other
 
 THE STORE. 59 
 
 hand, there would be twenty or thirty people 
 there, almost always women, for I observed that 
 the women seemed to be the purse-holders and 
 were intrusted with the buying and selling of 
 this community. I stored up many questions 
 to put to Spinner about the mechanism by which 
 these results were obtained, and one afternoon, 
 as we were driving together, I brought them all 
 out, and made him answer them all together. 
 
 " I see you have got on quite a central affair," 
 he said. " I shall make but a blundering story 
 of it, for indeed the system is one we have hit 
 upon from hand to mouth, if indeed it be a sys- 
 tem yet, and yet I think it is beginning to work 
 well. 
 
 " When I came up here first with Workman, I 
 said to him that whatever else we did, in our new 
 capacity as manufacturers, we would wash our 
 hands of 'store-pay,' with all its complications, 
 jealousies, and iniquities. You can see yourself 
 that there is a great temptation for a man who 
 comes into a new neighborhood, actually cuts 
 down trees and builds houses for a community, 
 to take upon himself the maintenance of the 
 country store. It is very easy to persuade such 
 a man that it is his duty to do so ; that he should 
 keep his workmen from being cheated ; and, in 
 four cases out of five, it is very probable that he 
 does. Still the thing is false in theory. Either
 
 60 HOW TIIKY LIVED IN HAMPTON, 
 
 a man is a manufacturer or he is a tradesman. 
 If he is a manufacturer, he is, so far forth, not 
 a tradesman, and if he is a tradesman, he is, so 
 far forth, not a manufacturer. Precisely as the 
 head of a factory had better not be the leader 
 of a military band, or as he had better not be 
 a publisher of school-books, he had better not be 
 the man to keep a country store. At least, that 
 was what I said to Workman, and what Work- 
 man said to me. We had seen endless jealousies 
 among workmen because they supposed their 
 employers were cheating them in this way, and 
 he said that, in our model town here, this diffi- 
 culty should not exist. I do not think we gave 
 much thought as to what should come in its 
 place ; I suppose we were too easy about that, 
 and imagined that it was one of those things 
 which would take care of itself. In which easi- 
 ness of ours, however, we were much mistaken, 
 for the thing has given us as much difficulty as 
 anything has given us which we have had to 
 handle here. It has given us the more difficulty 
 because we are what you see, — the only ele- 
 ment of life here ; there is absolutely nothing 
 but what we bring here, which divides this place 
 from such a wilderness as you saw yesterday 
 when you were fishing above Jotham's Ledge. 
 
 " We both saw, when we looked at the prop- 
 erty we had bought, that there was a building
 
 THE STORE. 6l 
 
 for a store, which the old company had carried 
 on. Its reputation was of the worst. They had 
 paid their workmen in orders on the store, and, 
 rightly or not, the workmen thought that these 
 orders had been the means of endless cheating. 
 When we began to talk with men about coming 
 up, the natural question was where they were to 
 do their marketing, and how they were to buy 
 their groceries, and so on. This question we 
 could only answer by the proud statement that 
 there was to be no store-pay, — that though we 
 did not pay much we should pay cash, and that 
 they might buy where they chose. This pleased 
 the workmen very much, till they found that 
 buying where they chose meant going down to 
 Went worth or going down to Whitby's. And 
 before long, there came a drummer up here, who 
 saw we had an empty store, and asked if we did 
 not want to have a store up here, and we said 
 we did. Before a week was over, he communi- 
 cated with his employers, and they had sent up 
 a clerk who had prospected, and we had a store 
 established here, purely on Adam Smith's prin- 
 ciple, that the demand created the supply. The 
 man hung out a big sign, and his goods began 
 to come in. 
 
 " I found very soon that the people disliked 
 him and his quite as much as the people before 
 them disliked the store-pay of their employers.
 
 62 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 Naturally enough, his principals pushed off on 
 us what they could not sell at home, and, in par- 
 ticular, they pushed off on us the wares, such as 
 they were, of which they were special agents. 
 The boys laughed very much because there was 
 an immense display of canned tomatoes and 
 canned corn and other such stuff, and they said 
 they were expected to live on canned vegetables 
 that were ten years old. Somebody would take 
 the cars down to Wentworth, and the next day 
 would have his groceries sent over the road here, 
 for a quarter dollar, and then would brag to the 
 others about how much he had saved by his lit- 
 tle journey. So they very soon starv^ed that man 
 out. After him, the Wentworth people tried to 
 establish a branch here, but on the whole they 
 gave that up. It was better for them, though 
 it was not so well for us, to have our men send 
 their wives ovei" the road and do their shopping 
 at their headquarters establishment, than it 
 was to be keeping a couple of clerks alive here 
 through the machinery of a separate store. 
 
 " It happened that at that time George Hol- 
 yoake was in the country. I do not think his 
 message was introducing the Rochdale system 
 here, but I knew he knew all about it, and I sent 
 to him and asked him if he would come and see 
 us in the course of his travels. So it was that 
 our people had a chance to hear him talk one
 
 THE STORE. 63 
 
 night, and he was good enough to give them an 
 off-hand talk on the working of the Rochdale 
 system, and said something as to the reason why 
 it had not introduced itself more fully in America. 
 The reason is, in brief, that our people like to 
 move from place to place as much as they do, 
 and the Rochdale plan really rests, though I 
 hardly think the Englishmen know it, on the 
 understanding that the more intelligent work- 
 men in a mill stay by the'mill from the time they 
 are born till the time they die. At the bottom of 
 his boots, the Englishman does not like to move 
 from place to place with his family ; while at 
 the bottom of his boots an American does. 
 However, we had had a great deal of trouble 
 from the supply and demand system, and Work- 
 man himself and some other of the more intelli- 
 gent men were well disposed to try the Rochdale 
 system, as Holyoake explained it to us. Mark 
 my words. You are going from place to place 
 in America, and you hear a great deal of talk 
 about co-operation in trade ; but I tell you that 
 the man is a fool who thinks he knows more 
 about the principles of co-operation than these 
 hard-headed Englishmen have found out in the 
 course of seventy-five years of every kind of ex- 
 perience. They do not theorize a great deal in 
 England, but they do know facts ; and the Roch- 
 dale system, which is a difficult system to ex-
 
 64 HOW TIli:V LIVED IX HAMPTON. 
 
 pkiin, has come into being from the observation 
 of the failure of more systems than were ever 
 tried in America. So lar as I have seen, the 
 e.xperiments of co-operations in trade in America 
 have failed very steadily, because in every in- 
 stance there was a man who was more or less a 
 crank, who founded the store, or whatever he 
 called it, and he was determined to try his own 
 system. Now the Rochdale system is not any 
 man's system in particular ; it is the result of a 
 great many failures and some successes, and the 
 fact that it works as well as it does in England 
 is a certain and strong argument in its favor." 
 
 I said to Spinner that I ought to know what 
 the Rochdale system was, but that I did not, 
 and asked him if there was any brief statement 
 of it. He said " Oh yes ! " and he telephoned to 
 the store to ask them to send over to me one of 
 their little reports which had an account of the 
 system as they meant to apply it ; and I will 
 print it in the form in which they gave it to me 
 at the end of this chapter. 
 
 "The up shot of it all is," said Spinner, "that 
 the store is well kept and not badly kept. Old 
 Randolph was right when he said that there was 
 no manure like the foot of the owner. They 
 have turned out a good many clerks, and a good
 
 THE STORE. 65 
 
 many have resigned because they wanted to turn 
 them out, but I am disposed to think that those 
 young fellows they liave there now understand 
 the business quite as well as if they had been 
 sent up from New York for the purpose. I 
 know very well that the two young women who 
 kept the accounts and write the letters under- 
 stand the business a great deal better than most 
 of the people I see in similar capacities, when I 
 am in Broadway. Here is something gained at 
 the beginning. In the second place, nobody can 
 complain ; or, if he does complain, he carries his 
 complaints where he ought to carry them, in- 
 stead of bringing them to me or to you or to 
 Workman or to anybody else who has nothing to 
 do with it. What do I care whether the ' boiled 
 shirt ' which one of my pickers buys is made 
 according to the last London fashion or not .'' I 
 would not be bothered with such things, — and 
 as this thing works I am not bothered with it. 
 The man who buys the shirt is to a certain ex- 
 tent the man who sells the shirt. At all events, 
 if the person who selected the shirt has selected 
 it wrong, it is the fault of the buyer, who ought 
 to have been at the quarterly meeting and chosen 
 somebody else in the directory. You can hardly 
 understand, living as you do, what a relief it is 
 to be relieved from all this nonsense. 
 
 "Then, in general, all these co-operative shops
 
 66 , now TIIEY LIVED IN' HAMl'TON. 
 
 have the great advantage that they have no need 
 whatever to advertise their wares or their exist- 
 ence. You v/ill find that the largest co-opera- 
 tive shops in England hardly advertise at all. 
 Every purchaser is interested in making some- 
 body else purchase, and he is 'touting,' con- 
 sciously or unconsciously, for the shop all the 
 time. When anybody comes to make a visit 
 here, — you, for instance, — the visitor goes 
 to the store and buys there. And when you 
 bought a watch key the other day it was to the 
 advantage of every man in this village that you 
 bought it here instead of buying it in New Ha- 
 ven. If you only take into account the relief to 
 you that you do not see the long bragging ad- 
 vertisements in the village newspaper, it is a 
 good deal ; but really these people have no occa- 
 sion whatever to advertise. 
 
 " Of course they have no occasion whatever to 
 keep adulterated goods, or to keep anything 
 which is not what it pretends to be. Why 
 should a man cheat himself .■' Why should the 
 person who is going to buy the goods send an 
 agent down to New York to buy pickles which 
 are artificially stained, or coffee which has been 
 made out of paste, or anything else which is not 
 what it pretends to be .'' You are pleased to 
 compliment our shop ; really, this freedom from 
 all temptation to buy inferior articles has a great
 
 THE STORE. 6^ 
 
 deal to do with the merit of what you have 
 seen. 
 
 " Whether such a system as I have described 
 to you can be made to succeed in America on a 
 scale larger than that upon which we are trying, 
 it is more doubtful. But I am quite clear about 
 this, — that if some man who knows this coun- 
 try well, and knows the habit of our working- 
 men, will give the same pains to this subject 
 here that Holyoake has done in England, we 
 shall get an American adaptation of the Roch- 
 dale plan which will answer our purpose. The 
 adaptation which we have made here may not 
 be such as they would need somewhere else. 
 What we have done is to give rather more cap- 
 ital stock to the undertaking in the beginning 
 than could be supplied by the simple co-opera- 
 tive principle. Holyoake would have rebuked 
 us for this, I think, but it was really necessary 
 in the conditions in which we were. I hope as 
 heartily as he would do, that gradually we may 
 have the affair more precisely on the English 
 basis, but that is still a matter for experiment 
 with us. I say this because I do not, as I have 
 said, care to vary much from the only successful 
 experiment of this sort which has been tried in 
 the world. 
 
 " I had been greatly impressed by what George 
 Holyoake says in all his books of the desirable-
 
 68 now TIIF-V LIVKD IN HAMPTON. 
 
 ness of each store maintaining, as a store, its 
 reading-room and other methods of instruction. 
 There was a very decent room or hall in the sec- 
 ond story of the store building, which we had 
 turned over to them ; and, after communication 
 with Mr. Nourse, I agreed to let that room go 
 without any additional rent, and to be at the 
 cost of fitting it up with tables and chairs, for a 
 reading-room. It serves, of course, for the busi- 
 ness meetings of the proprietors of the store, 
 and the men bring to it such newspapers, mag- 
 azines, and books as they care to have there. 
 They are permitted to smoke there, and it be- 
 comes a very respectable club-room for the vil- 
 lage. After a while, the women complained that, 
 although they were often stockholders in the 
 store, they could not stay where the men were 
 smoking ; and it ended in my giving the use of 
 another room, which was a sort of back build- 
 ing, which was fitted up for a general reading- 
 room, as it was called, where smoking was pro- 
 hibited. I think, on the whole, this has proved 
 to be the more popular room of the two, and 
 there is little competition between them as to 
 which shall get the latest magazines and the 
 best, and the presence of the women adds the 
 element of attractiveness to the place, which, to a 
 considerable extent, competes with the attraction 
 of the pipes and the freer rules of the original
 
 THE STORE. 69 
 
 room. All this you will sec if you go through 
 the store ; or, if you look at the accounts, you 
 will see that something — not much — is spent 
 for the library and reading-room in every quar- 
 terly distribution. When they are prosperous, 
 they are likely to make rather a larger distribu- 
 tion ; then when they are poor they appropriate 
 nothing at all ; in fact, this goes more or less by 
 fancy, according as the drift of a meeting is led 
 by a parsimonious member or by one who has 
 more liberal views." 
 
 I took an early opportunity, therefore, to go 
 into the store in the forenoon, after the women 
 had gone away. There was no one in when I 
 entered, but, at the sound of my entrance, Mr. 
 Ledger, the storekeeper, appeared from a room 
 behind, which, as I afterwards found, was the 
 reading-room. 
 
 I told him that people spoke to me about 
 the Rochdale system as if of course everybody 
 understood it, somewhat as people speak about 
 the Christian religion as if everybody understood 
 that. But I said I had found a great many people 
 talk about the Rochdale system who knew noth- 
 ing about it, and that f was willing to confess 
 that, though I had bought coats and hats and 
 slippers and portfolios at the co-operative store 
 in London, I did not know why they were cheap, 
 and indeed, I hardly knew why I went there.
 
 JO HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 I found Mr. Ledger was an enthusiast in the 
 matter, and was only too glad to have a hearer 
 to whom he coukl talk for one of the quiet hours 
 of the middle of the day, when he hardly had 
 any customers. I observed that there was a 
 boy, who attended to the one or two children 
 who did drop in for some trifling purchase. 
 
 He said that the idea of co-operation in the 
 purchasing of necessary articles was, as I knew, 
 an idea which had been experimented upon, no- 
 body knew how far back. " Nothing is easier," 
 he said, "than for a dozen families to think they 
 will buy their coal together at wholesale, will 
 divide it in the quantities they want, and so 
 make the profit which would ordinarily go to the 
 retail dealer who keeps a coal yard. But practi- 
 cally, you know such schemes as that never con- 
 tinue many years. There are so many con- 
 veniences in the coal yard, that after all you go 
 back to them, and persuade yourself that the 
 profit you made was not worth the trouble. I 
 remember that when I lived in Boston I could 
 go down to a certain point, perfectly well known, 
 at half-past five in the morning, and I could buy 
 my fresh fish there, at the rate of about a cent 
 and a half a pound. But I never did go there. 
 I went to a fish dealer, who made me pay any- 
 where between ten cents and twenty cents a 
 pound. I did not want more than five or six
 
 THE STORE. 7I 
 
 pounds of fish, and it was really not worth the 
 while for me to get up, perhaps before daylight, 
 go out to the place where fish was sold at whole- 
 sale, and bring it back. In that story is told 
 the whole of the reason why we pay so much as 
 we do for articles at retail, and why, on the whole, 
 it is an advantage for us to pay it. I suppose 
 there is no profit more fairly made than the profit 
 of the retailing middleman, much abused as he 
 always is. However, as I said before, nobody 
 can say how far back experiments of groups of 
 people buying to please themselves have been 
 tried. Sometimes it has been tried successfully 
 for a good many years, but nothing ever came 
 of it. 
 
 " Now the peculiarity of the Rochdale system, 
 which has made it succeed and grow, is this. 
 The more a man purchases, and the more he can 
 make other people purchase, the larger is his in- 
 terest in the concern, and the larger his profit. 
 If ten men should subscribe five hundred dollars 
 apiece, to make five thousand dollars capital with 
 which to carry on this store, they would have, 
 of course, an equal interest in the profits of the 
 store. They would try, as they could, to induce 
 as many people to come there and trade. But 
 there would be only these ten people who had 
 a personal interest in the success of the store. 
 
 "If, on the other hand, every person who
 
 72 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 deals with us is personally interested in making 
 the store successful, why, every one of them will 
 bring in more customers ; every one of them will 
 buy with us^ rather than go down to Wentworth 
 or to New Haven to buy ; every one of them will 
 advertise us in whatever way he can. As a mat- 
 ter of justice, or, I think, as a matter of religion, 
 the people who really sustain the store by buying 
 goods at it, are the people who ought to make 
 the profit if there is any profit to be made. 
 It is exactly like a mutual life insurance com- 
 pany, you see. Supposing the year is a healthy 
 year, ought not the people to have the benefit 
 whose lives are insured .'' or, if is an unhealthy 
 year, ought they not to pay for the unhealthi- 
 ness ? Just in the same way, if, for any reason, 
 the store is a profitable store, I think, as a mat- 
 ter of Christian justice, the people who deal at 
 the store ought to have the advantage. What 
 does a profitable year mean .'' It means that the 
 price which has been put on the retail of the 
 goods was rather higher than the necessities of 
 the business demanded. In other words, the man 
 who bought raisins and sugar here paid us rather 
 more than we need have asked him. If he paid 
 us more, why should not we give it back to him, 
 if we mean to deal — as, of course, we do mean 
 to deal — on terms coming as near to absolute 
 justice as is possible in human affairs .''
 
 THE STORE. 73 
 
 " But this, you will say, is theoretical. Taking 
 the thing practically, here am I, managing this 
 store. I was brought up to this sort of business. 
 I have owned a store, and I have been a clerk in 
 a store. To be an owner means that I have come 
 out at the end of the year not knowing how I 
 was to meet my notes in February. This on the 
 one hand ; on the other hand, I have been paid 
 a salary, once a week or once a month, from the 
 time when I had three dollars a week, for sweep- 
 ing out a store, to the time when I had twenty- 
 five hundred dollars, because I was the best 
 person they could employ at Pickering yonder. 
 Now, I am working here on a salary. I am one 
 of the kind of men that like to work on a salary. 
 Some men do, and some men don't ; but after 
 one had had experience of the ups and downs 
 — the good fortune and bad fortune — of what 
 is called business life, if he is such a person as I 
 am he likes the regularity of a paid salary. A 
 paid salary I have here. Beside that, I own some 
 stock in this store ; on that stock I draw my divi- 
 dends. Beside that, I buy almost everything I 
 need for my family here. I buy just as any other 
 customer would buy, and, according to the amount 
 of my purchases in a year, I am also entitled to a 
 dividend." 
 
 By this time I was a little confused, and I said 
 as much to Mr. Ledger. He laughed, and said : —
 
 74 HOW TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 "The whole thing is so simple to us that we 
 take it for granted that everybody will under- 
 stand it at the first blush. But if you will study 
 the little book of directions of ours, and then 
 come in and see me to-morrow, I will try to make 
 it clear to you." 
 
 Accordingly I took his book of directions, 
 which I copy here for the benefit of people as 
 little informed as I was. 
 
 Hampton Co-operative Store. 
 
 For the information of members, of purchas- 
 ers, and of all concerned, the following state- 
 ment is printed, copied from distinguished writ- 
 ers on the subject of co-operation. It will show 
 the principles on which the store is conducted. 
 
 Persons who wish more detailed information 
 will receive a copy of the Regulations of the 
 Store, by application to Mr. Ledger, at the store 
 itself. 
 
 Principles of Co-operative Trade. 
 In a properly constituted store the funds are 
 disposed of quarterly in seven ways : — 
 
 1. Rent, and expenses of management. 
 
 2. Interest due on all loans. 
 
 3. An amount equal to ten per cent of the 
 value of the fixed stock, set apart to cover its 
 annual reduction in value, owing to wear and 
 tear.
 
 THE STORE, 75 
 
 4. Dividends on subscribed capital of mem- 
 bers. 
 
 5. Such sum as may be required tor extension 
 of business. 
 
 6. Two and one half per cent of the remain- 
 ing profit, after all the above items are provided 
 for, to be appHed to educational purposes. 
 
 7. The residue, and that only, is then divided 
 among all the persons employed, and members 
 of the store, in proportion to the amount of their 
 wages, or of their respective purchases during 
 the quarter, varying from six per cent to ten. 
 
 The peculiar distinction of a co-operative 
 store is that a fixed interest is divided upon cap- 
 ital, say five per cent upon the shares each mem- 
 ber holds, and then all net profits are divided to 
 the trade upon the business each member has 
 done. 
 
 No credit is allowed, of any sort, to any pur- 
 chaser. The store buys for cash, and its mem- 
 bers have the advantage of such purchase. It 
 therefore sells for cash, and for cash only. 
 
 To secure the necessary capital for making a 
 store which shall meet the needs of Hampton, 
 the first twenty dollars of profit earned by any 
 purchaser will be charged to his credit, as one
 
 "J^ now TIIKY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 share of his capital. After he is the owner of 
 one share of capital, he will receive five per cent 
 annual dividend on that share, and his profits 
 will be paid to him in cash at the cjuarterly set- 
 tlements. 
 
 The store cannot keep open accounts with 
 persons who are not regular customers. Unless 
 purchases to the amount of one dollar are made 
 in each quarter, the purchaser loses all right to 
 a dividend. 
 
 The prices of the store will be as low as the 
 best stores in the neighborhood. The quality of 
 goods will always be what it is represented. 
 We have no motive to cheat ourselves, and, as 
 the purchasers are the same persons who sell 
 the goods, we have no motive to tell ourselves 
 lies. 
 
 We spend nothing for advertising. If you 
 wish to increase the business of the store, tell 
 your neighbors the truth about it, and bring them 
 to see. 
 
 Rules & Regulations. 
 
 1. Every person above the age of 14, residing in 
 this town, may become a member of the co-opera- 
 tive store, on the payment of twenty-five cents. 
 
 2. This money will be placed to his credit.
 
 THE STORE. "JJ 
 
 3. Each share of the company costs twenty 
 dollars. So soon as members have paid for one 
 share, they are privileged to attend quarterly, 
 annual, and social meetings. Members are urged 
 to complete the payment for their shares as soon 
 as possible. 
 
 4. For the amount of all purchases made at 
 one time, the purchaser, if a member, will receive 
 a metal check, stamped with figures indicating 
 the amount of his purchase. He must present 
 these checks. They are the only vouchers rec- 
 ognized for his purchases. 
 
 5. When he presents these checks, once a 
 quarter, the cashier will give him a statement, 
 made from them, of the amount of his purchases, 
 
 6. He is entitled to a dividend in proportion 
 to the amount he has bought. Thus, if he has 
 bought one hundredth part of all the shop has 
 sold, he is entitled to one hundredth part of all 
 its profits. 
 
 7. Until his first share is paid for, his divi- 
 dends are passed to his credit, in payment for 
 that share. But it is a great convenience to the 
 store for members to pay in cash for their first 
 shares, at once. 
 
 8. On each share, thus paid for, he will be 
 paid quarterly a dividend of one and a quarter 
 per cent, — amounting to five per cent in a year. 
 
 9. The receipts of the store will be divided
 
 7$ HOW TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 quarterly, after the expenses have all been met, 
 including rent, cost of management, an allowance 
 for depreciation of the goods and furniture, and 
 six per cent interest on capital. The residue 
 will be divided among the purchasers. 
 
 lo. Purchasers who have not become mem- 
 bers of the society will receive only half the 
 dividend to which they would be entitled had 
 they joined the society. And no person will 
 receive any dividend unless his purchases have 
 amounted to the sum of one dollar at one time. 
 
 Officers. 
 
 1. The officers of the society are a President, 
 five Directors, a Secretary, and a Treasurer. 
 
 2. They make their own rules. 
 
 3. They appoint the Storekeeper and his 
 Clerks. 
 
 4. They are responsible for all purchases, and 
 for the careful management of the property. 
 
 5. The books of the society are open to the 
 inspection of any member, on the approval of a 
 majority of the whole Board of Management. 
 
 The Quarterly Meetings are held on the after- 
 noon of Tuesday after the second Monday of 
 February, May, August, and November. The 
 annual meeting is held in November, at such a
 
 THE STORE. 79 
 
 time as may be ordered at the quarterly meeting 
 of that month. 
 
 And when I left Hampton, Mr. Ledger, know- 
 ing that I had some thoughts of establishing a 
 co-operative store at Pigotsville, where I had an 
 interest, gave me these cautions to officers, 
 which he had dio:ested from the English writers. 
 
 The Management : Officers and Employees, 
 THEIR Appointment and Duties. 
 
 I. TJie Committee and Officers. — There is 
 almost always a chairman and secretary, some- 
 times a treasurer, and a varying number of 
 committeemen. 
 
 Election. — The Chairman or President of the 
 society is generally chosen by the members in 
 quarterly meeting, sometimes by the committee 
 from among themselves. The Secretary, if a 
 paid servant, employed for accounts and other 
 matters of business, will be, and in the opinion 
 of most Co-operators certainly ought to be, ap- 
 pointed or dismissed by the committee. If the 
 secretary is only a minute secretary for commit- 
 tee-meetings, &c., he will be one of the commit- 
 tee, and will be appointed by them, or might be 
 elected, if desirable, in general meeting ; and in
 
 So now THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 this case, all the other duties are undertaken 
 by a paid official, whether general manager, 
 cashier, or otherwise. The Treasurer may be 
 chosen in either way. If there is no treasurer, 
 the secretary will discharge his duties. In the 
 opinion of some Co-operators, a treasurer is not 
 necessary. 
 
 Auditors. — It is most important that good 
 men should be selected. They ought to re- 
 member what a grave responsibility rests upon 
 them in signing balance sheets. They should 
 be careful of their own reputation, and not 
 run risks or try to screen the committee. 
 They ought to have a full knowledge of ac- 
 counts, which is not always found. 
 
 Payment. — In most societies committee-men 
 are paid for their attendance at the weekly com- 
 mittee ; but it is most desirable, in fixing the 
 scale of payment, to avoid the likelihood of 
 men trying to get on to the committee simply 
 for the sake of the fees. This is a danger to be 
 carefully watched in the co-operative movement. 
 The work of its managing men (not its paid of- 
 ficials, to whom it is a profession) should be 
 that of volunteers, who are repaid in modera- 
 tion for their expense of time and trouble, and 
 who will withdraw or resign their position at 
 once, without a moment's hesitation on the 
 score of money, if that is being done of which
 
 THE STORE. 81 
 
 they so strongly disapprove that they believe 
 this to be the right course ; otherwise they are 
 not independent, and may tend to get into the 
 hands of men more powerful than themselves, 
 who are well aware they will not resign if they 
 can possibly help it. 
 
 The Secretary may receive some additional 
 fee for his clerical labors. 
 
 Sub-committees. — In most societies there are 
 sub-committees to give special attention to the 
 various departments of the society work, — one 
 for groceries, another for bakery, another for 
 butchery, &c. In the earlier stages of a so- 
 ciety it may not be desirable, but later on it 
 becomes almost a necessity. As a rule, work- 
 ingmen committees have only the evenings 
 free, and the whole committee could not pos- 
 sibly all of them go into the matters requiring 
 attention. Subdivision of the work is neces- 
 sary. 
 
 Duties of Coniniitteeuien and Officers. — The 
 Chairman should have firmness, impartiality, 
 coolness, keenness and tact. It is no good 
 having a chairman, however virtuous, good- 
 natured, or consistent, if he cannot keep a 
 meeting in order. The Secretary should be 
 able to work hard and continuously, must be 
 well up in figures, and must write well and 
 quickly. A bad secretary can bring a society
 
 82 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 to grief very quickly. He ought not to try to 
 dictate to the committee, and, whatever his 
 own opinions, ought loyally to carry out their 
 decisions. In a committee there are always 
 likely to rise up rival parties. This ought to 
 be avoided as far as possible. A member 
 should firmly state his opinion, and accept a 
 defeat with good temper, or, if the matter is 
 serious, resign. He ought to feel himself free 
 to resign, if necessary, as has been mentioned 
 before. Party spirit on a committee is to be 
 deplored. The members should not send hot- 
 headed firebrands into office. They should 
 send steady-going, able men, who have a ca- 
 pacity for patient, persistent enthusiasm that 
 commands success and is not afraid of diffi- 
 culties. The committee should aim at keep- 
 ing the confidence of their members ; should 
 remember that the constitution of the society 
 is republican ; should not mind criticism, but 
 welcome it. It should be considered a golden 
 rule that the committee should never unneces- 
 sarily keep anything back from the members, 
 unless its being known is likely to be injuri- 
 ous to the society. Committees should desire 
 publicity and criticism of any kind within rea- 
 sonable limits. They should not be thin- 
 skinned, or make too frequent appeals to the 
 forbearance of members. Members ought to
 
 THE STORE. 83 
 
 have the moving power in as many matters as 
 possible, and this power should not be taken 
 from them. 
 
 Publicity and frank and full discussion of all 
 matters concerning the welfare of a society are 
 essential to its well-being. Many a society has 
 come to a bad end through the want of this. 
 The committee should never be jealous of ris- 
 ing talent among the members. There are 
 plenty of outlets for activity ; and, perhaps 
 more than anything else, what is needed now, 
 is that committees should encourage young 
 members to be personally interested in the 
 fuller and higher development of Co-operation 
 in many different ways. A great deal can be 
 done in the way of training up good and loyal 
 members and active and efficient officers in a 
 society where a good spirit prevails, and where 
 the best men have an influence such as they 
 deserve. 
 
 Servants of the Society. — All servants of the 
 society are almost invariably appointed and dis- 
 missed by the committee. 
 
 TJie Manager. — Upon the question what 
 kind of person is the storekeeper, manager, 
 or buyer, depends, to a very large extent, the 
 success or failure of the society. Is he to be 
 the master or the servant of the committee ? 
 What is to be the relation between them } A
 
 84 HOW TllliV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 manager has great opportunities of influence 
 tlirough much intercourse with the members, 
 and he can use it well or badly. Many man- 
 agers of co-operative stores are first-rate men, 
 and zealous Co-operators. Yet there are great 
 temptations to managers to aim at personal 
 power rather than the general welfare of the 
 society. 
 
 Checks on Managers. — Some societies are 
 content with a guarantee or deposit similar to 
 that demanded from the secretary or treasurer. 
 Such a guarantee merely provides against cer- 
 tain kinds of dishonesty. It does not provide 
 against waste. 
 
 {a) The English shops have advanced so far in 
 their system that they provide for what they call 
 Leakage Bonds. To aim at lessening waste 
 and preventing possible fraud, many societies 
 arrange for a leakage bond or agreement, to be 
 signed by the manager. In this he binds him- 
 self to return as much money as is equal to the 
 value of the goods intrusted to him, subject to 
 a deduction for leakage {i.e., waste and loss in 
 weighing out). Opinions differ as to the leak- 
 age allowable, and it depends partly on how the 
 accounts are made up ; 2d or yi in the pound 
 is a very ordinary average allowance. 
 
 {b) Check Systems. — There are many ways in 
 which a fraudulent manager or shopkeeper can
 
 THE STORE. 85 
 
 cheat a society, and no methods can obviate this 
 altogether. At the same time it is very impor- 
 tant that in order to remove temptation, and 
 keep the business up to the mark, there should 
 be a check system, with a view to seeing how much 
 cash really passes through the manager's hands. 
 
 Let it be understood that the mere having of 
 checks or tokens, metal or otherwise, as explained 
 before, to enable members to claim their divi- 
 dends at the end of the quarter, is not a cJieck 
 system in the sense of being a check upon mana- 
 gers and shopmen. You may or must have 
 checks, as they are called, to give to members ; 
 but it does not follow that you have any check 
 on your manager, or that the committee know 
 whether they get all the cash which is paid over 
 the counter. For instance, non-members who 
 know nothing about the dividend may come in, 
 (but add) pay, and go away without any check, 
 the shopman pocketing the money and not being 
 found out. It has been found also that with the 
 metal checks employees may pilfer the checks, 
 and their friends bring them in and claim divi- 
 dends at the end of the quarter. With the paper 
 checks, one being given for every sale, there is 
 some security, but even this has not always 
 worked well. 
 
 In large stores, the method of the shopmen 
 giving the customer a ticket, who takes it to a
 
 86 HOW TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 boy, who gives metal checks in exchange and 
 registers each shopman's sales, has been found 
 fairly satisfactory. For the whole subject, which 
 is a difficult one, see Manual of Checks, pub- 
 lished by the Central Board. Apparently, the 
 ideal check system has yet to be discovered. 
 Still, it may be said generally that a good com- 
 mittee can soon find out if a manager is doing 
 really well or not, and that, as in so many other 
 matters of management, the only thing to be 
 done may be to say to a manager, " We do not 
 charge you with dishonesty, but simply with 
 want of managing power. Experience shows 
 every day in every kind of business, that, of two 
 men with the best intentions, one can make a 
 good profit and the other will make a serious 
 loss. We have given you a good trial, and tried 
 to help you. We propose to part with you and 
 take another manager." 
 
 The Employees. — The shopmen, baker's men 
 with the cart, and others employed by the store, 
 will be appointed by the committee, who, if they 
 are wise, will give their managers and branch 
 managers a good deal of power in this matter. 
 Get good managers, and trust them in minor 
 matters ; give them power over those below 
 them, if you think they will use it well ; and 
 while always willing to investigate complaints, 
 show the employees that you do trust your man-
 
 THE STORE, 8^ 
 
 ager. If the committee as individuals listen to 
 the complaints of shopmen, clerks and others, 
 they may do a great deal of harm. Branch 
 managers should be made as far as possible re- 
 sponsible for what goes on at the branches, and, 
 if possible, should have a pecuniary interest in 
 the success of the branch. 
 
 Bonus to Employees. — Many societies have 
 begun this plan, and under pressure from their 
 members have given it up. It may fairly be 
 said that, if Co-operators believe in the principle 
 of workmen having a pecuniary interest in their 
 work, they ought to apply it to the shopmen in 
 their shops. Many Co-operators show by their 
 votes in meetings and by their practice that they 
 do not believe in this principle. On the other 
 hand, many do. Some committeemen would 
 gladly apply the principle if they could prove to 
 their members that a real saving is effected by 
 it. If it is to be conceded as an abstract prin- 
 ciple of justice, not many societies will carry it 
 on that ground. It is worth considering, whether 
 the plan which has been tried in some societies, 
 of giving a bonus on wages, at the same rate as 
 the dividend declared — e.g., \s 6d to 3^ in 
 the pound, according to the success of trade in 
 each quarter, is not a mistake, except in very 
 small stores. Rather it would seem that each 
 small group of employees should be made to feel
 
 88 TUnV THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 a tlircct personal interest in the part or branch 
 in which they are engaged. Then they have 
 much more chance of getting something by 
 their efforts, than they have as individuals of 
 raising the general dividend for the whole store 
 \d or 2(1 in the pound, which will bring them 
 but little after all. Where departmental accounts 
 are kept, it ought not to be difficult. If societies 
 and committees would turn their attention more 
 fully to this subject, and not listen to isolated 
 instances of failure, it is probable they would 
 find that there is a good deal more in this mat- 
 ter of profit-sharing by employees than has yet 
 been found out. The number of employees em- 
 ployed in distributive work in stores is about 
 13,000. Almost all societies close the store for 
 one half-holiday in the week, generally not on 
 Saturdays. In addition to this unusual priv- 
 ilege, the hours of labor are usually considerably 
 less than the hours in private shops. The Sat- 
 urday half -holiday for shops was largely inaugu- 
 rated by Co-operators. They felt that shop- 
 keepers had as much right to the holiday as 
 they had. For rules for shopmen, see a useful 
 paper at the end of Model Book-keeping. 
 
 Average Working Expenses. — These vary a 
 good deal : in some stores, they are as high as 
 seven and one-half per cent or more, in some be- 
 low five per cent ; but a great deal depends on
 
 THE STORE. 89 
 
 local circumstances. It is impossible to lay down 
 a rule. Inquiries should be made of societies in 
 similar circumstances. 
 
 Stock-taking. — Quarterly stock-taking (or 
 half-yearly, where the accounts are only made 
 up and dividends declared half-yearly) is a most 
 important matter, and it may become a fruitful 
 source, not only of error but of fraud. It must 
 be done on a systematic principle, and the mem- 
 bers of committees should personally superin- 
 tend it. Stock ought to be taken at cost price, 
 unless the goods are deteriorated, or the market 
 value has gone down. In that case, they should 
 be taken at what they would cost to buy at the 
 time stock is taken. In no case ought goods to 
 be put at more than cost price. To do so is to 
 appropriate the profits before the work of selling 
 has been done, and the expense of selling pro- 
 vided for.
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 THE ENTERPRISER. 
 
 I ASKED Mr. Spinner one day, with a good 
 deal of curiosity, in what consisted the dif- 
 ference between their plan and other arrange- 
 ments of co-operative workmen. I had always 
 been taught, at college, and by the superficial 
 writers on modern social order, that, while dif- 
 ferent nations had had different forms of success 
 in Co-operation, no one could yet claim that 
 success in co-operative manufacture which he 
 felt sure the Hampton plan had secured. 
 
 It is generally said that the co-operative sys- 
 tem of house-owning which in America is called 
 the Philadelphiasystem, by which a Philadelphia 
 workman comes to own the house he lives in, is 
 peculiar to America. 
 
 It is generally said that the co-operative sys- 
 tem of savings banks, — as it was discussed by 
 Mr. Scheffer, — in which the small depositors 
 are themselves the capitalists who lend to the 
 small borrowers, is a system peculiar to Ger- 
 many. 
 
 It is said also that the Rochdale system, the
 
 THE ENTERPRISER. QI 
 
 system of co-operative buying and selling, as it 
 has been described in the chapter above, called 
 "The Store," has succeeded in England, and 
 nowhere else. And it is popularly said by the 
 general writers on this subject that co-opera- 
 tive experiments in manufacturing have been 
 short-lived, or have been on too small a scale 
 to be of much account in the great exigencies of 
 modern commerce. 
 
 Mr. Spinner replied by saying that there are a 
 good many large exceptions to the statement 
 that co-operative industry has not succeeded 
 on a large scale. The fishing industry in Great 
 Britain, in France, and in America, has always 
 been conducted on this principle. The men 
 who go on the voyage divide the profits of the 
 voyage by a scale determined long ago, — in 
 which the master's rate differs from the mate's, 
 his from the expert seaman, and his from the 
 novice or the boy. The great cheese-factories 
 of the dairy towns are conducted very largely 
 on this principle. The farmer who sends in 
 only a gallon of milk a day is a shareholder 
 in the enterprise of the year, and receives his 
 proportional dividend as regularly as if he fur- 
 nishcd half the milk needed for the enterprise. 
 The difificulty comes, unquestionably, — this was 
 Mr. Spinner's theory, — when the kind of manu- 
 facturing is such as to require a large invest-
 
 92 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 mcnt of capital. In the cheese-factory the raw 
 material is the principal charge. In the fish- 
 eries the daily labor is the principal charge. 
 But the factory requires a much larger plant, 
 in proportion, than cither fishery or cheese- 
 factory. 
 
 This difficulty had been met by the Co-opera- 
 tors at Hampton when they agreed with Mr. 
 Nourse to pay him a regular interest on the 
 capital he furnished for this purpose. 
 
 But even then the Co-operators in manufac- 
 ture meet a second difficulty. They are trained 
 to make goods. But they may make as well as 
 Aladdin's genii, — and this will be of no use, if 
 they cannot sell. More than this, — it is of no 
 use to make well unless you can buy the mate- 
 rial cheaply and to advantage. It is clear 
 enough that a man who is weaving cloth can- 
 not be buying wool, — perhaps a thousand miles 
 away, — nor selling cloth, after it is made. 
 The workman who spins and weaves and dyes 
 is another person, in another business, from 
 the manager who has to buy wool in one mar- 
 ket and to sell cloth in another. And, if the 
 workman has to be dependent upon some com- 
 mission merchant who undertakes for him either 
 of these duties or both, he is in as uncomforta- 
 ble a position as when he was dependent upon 
 the capitalist. In practice, in the ordinary sys-
 
 THE ENTERPRISER, 93 
 
 tern, the capitalist undertakes this middleman's 
 affair. He buys the wool and sells the cloth, — 
 if the enterprise is like that at Hampton. 
 
 But there is no reason, in the nature of 
 things, why a capitalist should know how 
 to buy wool or sell cloth any better than the 
 weaver or spinner. It is a business wholly 
 distinct from the business of lending money. 
 And in point of fact, the failures of manufac- 
 turers come in quite as often, because the men 
 who have this part in charge do not carry on 
 their business well, as because the goods are 
 not up to their standard when the workmen 
 have failed in their duty. 
 
 "It is here," said Mr. Spinner, "that you find 
 the distinctive part of our system. Nourse fur- 
 nishes the money. We pay him for it, — as we 
 would pay any bank for money which we needed. 
 The workmen make the goods. We pay them 
 for their day's work, exactly as you would pay 
 the painter who painted your house. But 
 thirdly, we make a separate business of con- 
 triving the work, determining on the patterns 
 and plans, buying the material, selling the 
 goods. 
 
 "This is not the affair of the workman. He 
 does not know how. 
 
 "It is not the affair of the capitalist. He 
 does not know how.
 
 94 IIOW THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 " In our plan it devolves on Mr. Workman and 
 myself. We think we know how. We try to 
 learn how. And the whole thing will go to de- 
 struction if wc do not know how. In point of 
 historical fact, there would be no mill here on 
 this basis, if we had not made the negotiation 
 with Mr. Nourse, and made him believe it pos- 
 sible. The old workmen and their wives know 
 this ; and the hands generally understand it. 
 In practice it is so clear that ' managing,' — 
 buying, selling, contriving, — are different oper- 
 ations from spinning, weaving, and dyeing, that 
 the thing explains itself, so soon as men look 
 into it. 
 
 "Very well. As I explained to you, we are 
 recognized as interested to the amount of one- 
 third on the success of the concern. That 
 is a rough average, probably not quite accu- 
 rate, but nearly so, — and convenient. We are 
 paid living wages, — as if we were foremen of 
 rooms perhaps, head-dyers, or whatever. But, 
 when the yearly balance is made up, what- 
 ever the profit is, Nourse receives one-third of 
 that profit, the workmen receive a third, — 
 just in proportion to their wages, — and we 
 receive a third. If we were paid in propor- 
 tion to our wages only, we should not receive 
 so much. But you see, that is as broad as it is 
 long. If we were not to have this fixed share.
 
 THE ENTERPRISER. 95 
 
 — one-third of the profit, — we should never 
 undertake the management of the affair. Why 
 should we .-• I am as good a master-weaver as 
 the head of either of our weaving-rooms. Why 
 should I undertake all this business of buying, 
 selling, planning, and in general ordering, if I 
 am not to be paid for it .' " 
 
 Thus Mr. Spinner made me understand that 
 the failure of most co-operative enterprises has 
 resulted from the badness of the general man- 
 agement. This has resulted from the unwilling- 
 ness to pay the general manager. The natural 
 suggestion is that capital shall have half the 
 profit and the workingman half. This is not 
 founded on any fixed law, but it seems to be a 
 convenient and easy division. It does not work. 
 The reason is that there is a third and wholly dis- 
 tinct business involved. This is management. 
 It means buying and selling, planning, directing, 
 selecting, enlarging work or reducing it. It re- 
 quires a different training and a different use of 
 time from the others. 
 
 Spinner showed me figures, which he had 
 drawn out very carefully from the books of 
 some of the largest American establishments 
 and from those of some of the smallest. He had 
 drawn them off very carefully in tables. They 
 showed what proportion of the gross earnings of 
 these mills, year in and out, went for the work-
 
 96 HOW THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 men, what proportion went for material, what 
 propoition went for the profits of the owners, 
 and what was the interest on the capital at the 
 market rates for the year. Of course, one year 
 varied from another. One figure was up and 
 another down, as the market for wool varied, or 
 that for cloth, or that for money, or that for 
 work. But, on the whole, in the average, it was 
 curious to see that his rough division into thirds 
 came out about fairly. To give to handiwork 
 one-third the profit, to management one-third, 
 and to capital one-third, after each had been paid 
 the minimum of its livang rate, was evidently an 
 arrangement almost exactly just. One year with 
 another, you could hardly do better. 
 
 " In a word," he said to me once and again, 
 " co-operative enterprises generally fail because 
 they do not pay the management." 
 
 I said to him one day, that he had made this 
 sufficiently clear to me. Most business men 
 would accept the statement as quite central, 
 that the managers of an enterprise must be well 
 paid or they will fail. Authors, for instance, do 
 not find it well to print and sell their own books. 
 They find it better to write them, and delegate 
 the printing and sale of them to other men who 
 make that their business. The money which
 
 THE ENTERPRISER. 9/ 
 
 the author receives for his part of the work is 
 pretty generally agreed upon. In America, it is 
 ordinarily ten per cent of the gross sales at retail 
 prices. The profit of the retail dealer is also 
 generally agreed upon. It is forty per cent of 
 the retail prices of the books he sells. There is 
 left, then, to the wholesale publisher, the printer 
 and the binder, to the freight companies which 
 carry the book from place to place, and to the 
 newspapers and magazines which advertise it, 
 fifty per cent of the gross sales. This rough 
 statement shows that in the business of the 
 manufacture and sale of books a very large part 
 of any profit is paid to management. The pro- 
 portion will differ, of course, in different sorts 
 of adventure. If I manufacture plain sheetings, 
 I make an article for which there is a steady 
 demand. The risk of putting it on the market 
 is less than if it were a volume of sonnets or a 
 novel. But, on the whole, men find that it is 
 better to intrust the sale of their work to people 
 who are used to that business, and to pay them 
 well for it. An author may print his own book, 
 or pay the printer for doing so. But he will be 
 apt to have a very large pile of his own books in 
 his own attic or cellar. In the long run, he will 
 find it best to pay for the oversight of publishing. 
 I said to Mr. Spinner that I could well see 
 that men acquainted with general business
 
 98 now TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 should recognize the truth of his maxim, that 
 you must pay well for management. But I said 
 I should not think that when the day for the 
 dividend came the workmen would like it. I 
 should think they would be jealous of that part 
 of the plan. 
 
 He replied rather grimly, as if I had hit a 
 spot which it v/as disagreeable to him to talk 
 about. I have observed that visitors who are 
 not quite at home with their hosts are a little 
 apt to bring up the most delicate questions, as 
 if the solution could be given in an epigram. 
 Thus, in old times, an English traveller would 
 ask a Southern planter if he thought the system 
 of slavery abstractly just ; and an American 
 clergyman to-day will ask an English bishop 
 why he does not prevent the sale of clerical pre- 
 ferments. In somewhat this way, — inoppor- 
 tune, I will confess, — I asked Mr. Spinner 
 whether the work-people liked the arrangement 
 by which " Management " took one-third of the 
 profit. I saw in a moment that it was a matter 
 a good deal discussed, and that the renewal of 
 the discussion with a novice annoyed him. I 
 could not help that, however, and, in truth, I 
 did not much care. I was there, not to enter 
 tain him, but to find, if I could, what was their 
 solution of the problems of capital and the in- 
 dustry it needed ; — or, if you please, of industry
 
 THE ENTERPRISER. 99 
 
 and the capital it needed. Mr. Spinner had 
 said, again and again, that the essential part of 
 their system was the distinct recognition of the 
 value of the management. I did not understand 
 the system, — that was very clear, — until I 
 knew whether the workmen liked the theory as 
 well as he did, who was himself a manager. 
 
 His mere manner was enough to show that 
 this was familiar ground to him, which he had had 
 to go over till he was tired, with every new in- 
 quirer. Very well ; I could not help that. Of 
 course it was to be often explained, if it was the 
 distinctive part of their system. 
 
 He asked pardon, however, for the annoyance 
 on his face, which he saw that I observed. Then 
 he really laughed at himself. " It is ground so 
 familiar to me," he said, " that I forget that it is 
 new to others, — as the ticket-master forgets 
 that the woman who asks him questions to-day 
 is not the same woman who asked them yester- 
 day. 
 
 "I do not think the 'old men,' as we call 
 them, though most of them are not forty, ever 
 have any question about this part of the plan. 
 Indeed, they know, as well as I do, that it is es- 
 sential. They know that none of them or any 
 of us would be here, unless the managers had 
 laid out the system. As I said, they know, as a 
 fact in history, that Workman and I persuaded
 
 lOO now TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 Nourse to come into the plan. They know, 
 also, that we are the people whom he looks to, 
 — that he deals with us, as far as there is any 
 dealing between him and the concern, — so that 
 we are a necessity. What is more, however, 
 they know that, in fact, the thing works well, — 
 that they receive, on the whole, much higher 
 wages than they ever had before they came 
 here, — that the work of the mill is better than 
 it was in old times, and the reputation of our 
 goods higher in the market. They know that 
 we work with less waste and more profit, be- 
 cause we are working on this general plan. So 
 far, good. And so far as those who began with 
 us go, there is never any discussion. 
 
 " But you are quite right in thinking that 
 new-comers, who have not worked with us 
 long, invariably question this part of our ar- 
 rangement at first. They say that Workman 
 and I have the lion's share. The boys caricature 
 us sometimes, well ; even the older ones will 
 fling at us in the club meetings and other dis- 
 cussions. Of course there have been a thousand 
 other plans proposed. Of course, any hand new 
 at the bellows thinks he can blow better than 
 the old hand did, and makes his new suggestion. 
 It generally amounts to this, of course, — that a 
 considerable sum would be saved to the work- 
 men themselves if a committee of manasrement
 
 THE ENTERPRISER. lOI 
 
 of their own superintended the work, as Work- 
 man and I do now ; — if a fixed allowance were 
 made to them for their compensation, and then 
 the whole profit were divided in proportion to 
 the wages. I do not see that they are apt to 
 wish to increase Nourse's share. 
 
 " But I ask nothing better than that a critic 
 shall have to put his plan on paper, and make it 
 popular with the rest. Observe, there is no an- 
 nual meeting where it can be proposed as a 
 practical scheme. Every one knows that these 
 works are not run by caucus or in town-meeting. 
 No one is here long who does not like to be here. 
 And, unless the man likes to come, and take 
 wages at our rates, he does not come. Still, 
 the whole scheme is certainly democratic, and 
 rests on the substantial satisfaction of every- 
 body. Naturally, it attracts more than an aver- 
 age share of theorizers or schemers. So that in 
 any debating-club, as at the Union, it is very 
 likely that an Ideal Plan for its improvement 
 shall be brought forward. And in this country, 
 particularly when times are bad, there will be a 
 plenty of broken-winded flannel mills, or other con- 
 cerns which have shut down, where the owners 
 are open to offers to buy cheap. There was a 
 young man here, named Crichton, who wanted 
 to persuade some of the other young fellows to 
 go up to Eden, twenty miles up the river, with
 
 I02 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 him, and work out a plan he had. So, in one 
 way or another, we have had plenty of plans for 
 improving on our method of sharing. 
 
 "This is the reason why I say so confidently 
 that the making an equal allowance to 'Manage- 
 ment ' has proved necessary: — I mean an al- 
 lowance of profit, equal to that assigned to Work 
 and to Capital. It has proved necessary, be- 
 cause so many of these other plans have been 
 proved inefificient. The men will not trust them- 
 selves and their families to an annual caucus. 
 They will not go into a scheme which may be 
 over-set in a minute. And capital will not trust 
 itself, unless there is somebody to trust itself to. 
 Theo. Brown used to say that when you made a 
 stocking, you could not 'make believe' round 
 once, and then knit into the ' make believe.' 
 There must be something to knit into. In prac- 
 tice, there must be a management, which may 
 contract with the men and compact with the 
 property owner." 
 
 I said that it was the fate of middlemen to 
 be unpopular. Spinner said that I need not tell 
 him that. But he said that that was one thing 
 v.'hich they were for ; that some one must stand 
 the brunt ; and that, if he and Workman were 
 honest and impartial, and carried open accounts, 
 which every one might see, he would risk any 
 unpopularity.
 
 THE ENTERPRISER. IO3 
 
 "In truth," he said, "with every year there 
 is less and less of such complaining or such criti- 
 cism as you inquire about. The scheme rests on 
 its substantial justice. When you buy a piece of 
 meat in the market, or hire a cab at the Forty- 
 Second Street Station, you do not complain be- 
 cause the butcher makes a profit, or the cab- 
 driver. You do not suppose that either of them 
 is there as a philanthropist, and you do not sug- 
 gest to them that they shall send you a check on 
 Christmas Day, with your share of the profits of 
 the year. You recognize butchering and cab- 
 driving as a different business from your business, 
 and you do not ask to share the cab-driver's prof- 
 its, more than you expect him to share yours. 
 You do share profits in a Mutual Insurance Com- 
 pany, for there you are all in the same enterprise, 
 and you succeed or fail under the same laws. 
 And so, in the spinning and weaving, we are all 
 in the same business, and gain or lose by the 
 same laws. But, as I said in the beginning, two 
 things are sure. i. Management is a separate 
 profession, which must be well paid. And 2. 
 Management involves permanence, or there will 
 be no confidence or security. 
 
 "I have told you," said he, "of the criticisms. 
 Now let me tell you a story on the other side. 
 When, in October two years since, the money 
 market tightened up as it did, half a dozen large
 
 104 IlOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 mill-owners chose to fail, and there was what 
 you might call a special panic in the trade in 
 woollens, besides the general panic on Wall 
 Street, which is apt to come round in the autumn. 
 As it happened, we were carrying an unusually 
 large stock of goods, which I did not choose to 
 sacrifice at a time when the market was badly 
 depressed. But we wanted money, — we wanted 
 it badly. In ordinary times, I could have had 
 it for the asking, at one of the three or four 
 banks where they knew our paper. But they 
 would not look at me then, and, — well, I do not 
 like to go to note shavers. Now there is very 
 little secrecy among us managers here. And 
 when I came home pretty blue, one Saturday 
 night, it was known quite soon Monday morning 
 what was the matter with me. Then it was that 
 the system was tested, Mr. Freeman. One of 
 those very men who had said the hardest things 
 of me not a year before, — you know the man, 
 he is that man Woodruff, whose son you took 
 a-fishing, — came round to me on Monday night. 
 He told me that they had been putting their 
 heads together, and comparing their bank-books, 
 and that, if I thought twelve thousand dollars 
 would be of any use to me the next Saturday, 
 they could manage that I could have it, and as 
 much more at the end of the month. And more 
 than this ; he said if we were pinched for money,
 
 THE ENTERPRISER. 10$ 
 
 as he thought we should be hkely to be, he had 
 a Hst, which he gave me, of forty-seven of the 
 best hands he had, who would not draw their 
 wages for four or five weeks from that time. 
 Well, long before his five weeks were up, I had 
 sold my goods at very handsome prices, and I 
 was able to address them a circular note, to 
 thank them for their loyalty." 
 
 Spinner told this pretty story with a good deal 
 of pride. He opened his desk, and took out a 
 copy of his circular note, handsomely printed, 
 and gave it to me. It was in these words : — 
 
 "Office of the Hampton Mills. 
 
 " On behalf of the management of the mills, 
 and of Mr. Nourse, who is absent in the Holy 
 Land, the undersigned wish to express their 
 thanks as well as his for the loyalty, good sense 
 and courage with which all parties have rendered 
 efficient assistance to the Mills, in the late 
 severe commercial crisis. 
 
 " It may be true that, in the disorganized con- 
 dition of trade and commerce, such panics or 
 crises cannot be avoided. 
 
 " But this is certain, that, with such good will 
 and devotion to a common cause as have been 
 shown by those who have undertaken the enter- 
 prise of the Hampton Mills, the convulsions of 
 the money-market are not to be greatly dreaded.
 
 I06 now TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 We have had an opportunity to show each other, 
 if we did not know it before, that there is 
 strength in union. And such an experience 
 as this of the last two months is enough to 
 prove that our enterprise is on a soHd foun- 
 dation. 
 
 " With new wishes to deserve the confidence 
 and respect of our fellow-workmen, we are 
 "Their friends, 
 
 "William Spinner. 
 "John Workman." 
 
 "There was really nothing wonderful about 
 it," said Spinner thoughtfully, when he saw that 
 I had twice read his circular through. " No, — 
 keep it. I gave it to you to keep. I have more 
 copies here. 
 
 " There was really nothing wonderful about it, 
 if one will only remember who Jesus Christ was, 
 and what he meant to set in motion, — nay, what 
 he did set in motion. Mr. Freeman, if I could 
 tell the ministers what to preach, I would have 
 them, as often as once a month, show to people, 
 especially young people, how practical, how effi- 
 cient, — how business-like, if you please, — this 
 gospel of our Lord is. There is apt to be so 
 much rhetoric and poetry in preaching, that I 
 am afraid young people think Christianity is all 
 outside of life, — that it is matter of fancy or
 
 THE ENTERPRISER. IO7 
 
 imagination. Now, if I were a preacher, I 
 should hke nothing better than to show that 
 the Saviour was the most practical reformer, as 
 he was certainly the most successful reformer, 
 not only in what they call in their sermons the 
 affairs of Heaven, or the Heavenly Kingdom, 
 but in what you or I or these young people 
 would call ' Every-day life. ' 
 
 " Did I ever tell you of what Mrs. Spinner 
 said to a fine lady in Warburton yonder, who 
 was troubled because she could not keep her 
 servants .-• " 
 
 I said he never had. Mr. Spinner laughed. 
 "Why," said he, "Nancy heard her long story 
 about the troubles she had had ever since she 
 began housekeeping, and then she said, * Did 
 you ever try the golden rule .-• ' "
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CHILDREN S WORK. 
 
 I NOTICED, on the first day when I went 
 through the mills, that there were no little 
 children at work in any department. There 
 were a good many young people, whom I 
 should call boys and girls, but they were, 
 clearly enough, more than sixteen years old. 
 
 I noticed, also, however, that there were no 
 boys loafing about the village. After my first 
 day's experience in seeking trout in the ponds 
 above the town, I tried to find a boy who would 
 go with me, to carry an extra basket I had, and, 
 indeed, for companionship. And although, after 
 a day or two, I secured the service of such a 
 boy, — who became a valued friend before I 
 left Hampton, — this was only after rather a 
 careful negotiation, and on special terms, which, 
 if this paper does not grow too long, I may 
 have a chance to tell. 
 
 I was talking one afternoon with a man 
 named Holmes, whom I had fallen in with in 
 the works, and of whom I have spoken once 
 already, and I asked him particularly about
 
 CHILDREN S WORK. IO9 
 
 what he thought of the labor or work of chil- 
 dren, and what they did about it. He said 
 that he did not know of any fixed rule in the 
 matter, which would prevent Mr. Spinner from 
 hiring many more children if he wished, or if 
 he thought the work required it. " But," he 
 said, with a good deal of emphasis, knocking 
 the ashes from his pipe as a sort of gesture 
 accompanying, "he docs not think the work 
 requires it, — and we do not think so, — I do 
 not think so, — and the men generally do not." 
 It was quite clear to my mind, as he spoke, 
 that in the face of such unanimity of "the 
 men " Mr. Spinner would not be apt to change 
 his opinion. 
 
 "You see, Mr. Freeman," said Holmes, "most 
 of the men grew up in mills, — were trained in 
 them themselves, — and they do not like it. I 
 was in a mill in England, so young that I hardly 
 remember anything before I went there. Well, 
 there is no doubt that a boy picks up some- 
 thing that way. He gets steady habits of 
 work, I guess, and I guess there is a certain 
 promptness, — readiness, — call it what you 
 will, in good hands that have been trained so, 
 trhat they would say came from their beginning 
 early. But then, what is that ? I have plenty 
 of men and women in this mill who never saw a 
 loom till they were twenty years old, who are
 
 I lO HOW TIIEY LIVI:D IN HAMPTON. 
 
 just as prompt and just as steady. They did 
 not get it in one way, so they got it in another. 
 
 "To go back, Mr. Freeman, I do not think, 
 on the whole, that men or women who grew 
 up from childhood in a mill want to have their 
 children grow up so, if they can help it. If they 
 can help it, — that's where it is. Perhaps they 
 think they cannot help it. Perhaps the whole 
 business is counted so close, — I mean is car- 
 ried on with so narrow a margin, — that the 
 wages of the family only amount to enough to 
 keep the family in bread and butter. But then, 
 what does this mean ? I do not know how 
 much you know of trade or manufacturing. I 
 know that there is no such squeeze as that in 
 the woollen business now, — nor has been for 
 twenty years, — nor is like to be. No, indeed, 
 Mr. Freemaft ; and if there were any, I would 
 give up making cloth, and I would go to Dakota 
 and make wheat, or to Montana and make wool, 
 — that's what I would do." 
 
 And Mr. Holmes laughed as he thought of 
 himself on a ranch in Montana. 
 
 " You see," he continued, filling his pipe again, 
 " you see, Mr. Freeman, there are a great many 
 other things a boy has to learn, and a girl too, 
 besides spinning and weaving, if they are to live 
 decently and comfortably in such a country as 
 America. And I do not mean school learning
 
 CHILDREN S WORK. Ill 
 
 either. That's all very well, but my children learn 
 a good many things, and need to learn them, 
 which Miss Jane Stevens does not teach them, 
 nor any other schoolmistress or schoolmaster." 
 
 I said that I believed he had a good many 
 children. 
 
 "Ten of my own," he said with some pride, 
 "and Peter, who came in with the mail just now. 
 He is just the same as one of ours, but he is 
 really the cousin of the others, son of a brother 
 of Mrs. Holmes, who was lost at sea. Eleven of 
 them there are, I took Tom into my own room 
 with me the day he was sixteen, — and I suppose 
 I shall let Susie come in the day she is sixteen, if 
 she wants to. But maybe she will change her 
 mind before then." 
 
 And he paused a minute, as if considering 
 this question, before he went on in his rather 
 voluble conversation. 
 
 "I told them, when we came here," he then 
 said, "that if we meant to have our children 
 grow up strong men and women, they must be 
 in the open air, they must have enough to eat 
 and drink, and they must want to eat and drink 
 it. You see, Mr. Freeman, it is my notion that 
 all mill-towns have suffered from the idea that 
 they are to be nothing but mill-towns. You 
 say ' Lowell is a factory-town,' and ' Holyoke 
 is a factory-town,' as if because they are fac-
 
 112 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 tory-towns, they can be nothing else. Suppose 
 you made the people in a ship into one com- 
 munity in this fashion. Suppose that when 
 you launched her, you said to all the people 
 that sailed her that they were to be sailors, or 
 at sea, all their lives. Suppose you said so to 
 their wives and children, — just like those peo- 
 ple that live in the boats in Canton harbor. 
 What sort of men, I wonder, would grow up 
 on your ship ? After all, the mill is only a ship 
 on land. And what. I say is, that the boys and 
 girls in it, even if they are, in the end, to work 
 in it, want to see and learn and know some 
 other things, just as the sailor's boys do be- 
 fore they go out with him : — and, for that 
 matter, his girls, who never go out with him. 
 
 " Now it was easier for us to act on such a 
 plan, because here, from the beginning, the men 
 who owned this plant had the courage to say 
 that they would earn their money in manufact- 
 uring and in nothing else. For the rest of their 
 investment they wanted interest and not profits. 
 Perhaps you know how they gave up the store, 
 and said they did not mean to try and make 
 money out of that ; that v/as not their affair. 
 So they gave up the tenements." 
 
 I said that I did know this, and that I hoped 
 to know more of the Co-operative System than 
 I did when I came to Hampton.
 
 CHILDREN S WORK. II3 
 
 "Well, now," he said, "the same rule works, 
 of course, about rents and gardens, — houses, 
 — about these places where we live. Of course, 
 when a man like our Mr. Nourse buys a prop- 
 erty like this, there is a temptation to see what 
 the rents on the houses will be. It is natural to 
 say 'they have always rented for ten per cent 
 on the valuation or cost, and that will be but a 
 very small rent,' — so he will go on so. There 
 is no great oppression if he wants to do so. But 
 I do not believe it pays in the long run. To be- 
 gin with, I do not believe it pays any man to be 
 in two or three different trades. If he makes 
 horse-shoes, I say let him make horse-shoes, 
 and not try to sell ribbons in the evenings. If 
 a man makes woollen cloth, let him sell woollen 
 cloth, and not have another account for the gro- 
 cery shop, and another for the rents and repairs 
 of his houses. That's the way it looks to me. 
 
 " Anyway, as you know, these people, or 
 rather, this man, were ready to let us do what we 
 chose, if we only paid him the market interest 
 on the capital, and gave him a third of the 
 profits, if profits there were. 
 
 " Now I, and Spinner, and Workman, — v/ell, 
 a good many of us, — we went in for Real Estate. 
 
 "Real Estate, Mr. Freeman, with a large R 
 and a large E, — a very large R, and a very large 
 E. ' Fasten a man to the ground,' says I, * and
 
 114 '"^^^' THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 let it be worth his while to make it worth living 
 on.' No, Mr. Freeman," — and he laughed, — " I 
 spent a winter with the Cherokees once, at a 
 place they call Tahlequah. I saw enough of com- 
 mon property in land then and there, and I do 
 not want to see any more. * Real Estate,' says 
 I. And when I said this to the others, I did 
 not go back on what I have been saying to you. 
 Because when I own a place, as I own this 
 place," — and here Holmes looked up with a 
 certain pride on his wife's trumpet vines and 
 Dutchman's pipe, which shaded the piazza where 
 we were sitting, — " when I owned this place, — 
 when I bought it, — I did not buy it to make 
 money. I make money yonder, — I make money 
 by making cloth, — or helping make it. But I 
 want a real home. I want it for her, and I want 
 it for them. And so I said to Spinner and Work- 
 man, says I, ' You let these boys and girls of 
 mine live in a place I own, and we shall all take 
 care of it. You put me in a tenement some- 
 body else owns, — and for one I shall be apt to 
 let somebody else take care of it.' So they fixed 
 it, or all of us fixed it together. They gave me 
 a bond for a deed of this place ; it was one acre 
 then ; I have another acre back there now, and 
 afterward I bought a wood-lot yonder. I was to 
 pay five per cent interest, and ten per cent a 
 year on the capital if I could, and I was to have
 
 CHILDREN S WORK. 1 1 5 
 
 a deed when I had paid forty per cent. But, 
 you know, after we were sure the thing would 
 work here, it was not much money, and I drew 
 out of the savings bank all I needed to pay up 
 the whole. Yes, it is a pretty place. But it's 
 a much prettier place than it was when we came 
 here. And that is what I was coming at. If 
 you do not mind, put on your hat, and come 
 round with me." 
 
 So we walked round his little domain. Yes ; 
 a little domain, but his own. And he had all 
 the pride in it, and had the right to, which my 
 friend Mr. Coram has, when he takes me 
 through his grape-houses and other forcing 
 houses. He made me go into the large hen- 
 house, and showed me what he could of the 
 methods of the hatching house. But he said he 
 must not interfere too far, or his wife and his 
 girls would be after him. He told me with pride 
 that, excepting three days' labor, when he hired 
 a man to help in digging some post-holes, and 
 in some other heavy work, every nail had been 
 driven, every partition framed, and every sash 
 fixed in its place by the handiwork of his boys. 
 " Let them laugh at the Industrial School," said 
 he, "that is what comes of it." Then I had to 
 go through the back lot, which had been added 
 to the other, and I was indeed surprised to see 
 the show he had of pears, and to notice how sci-
 
 Il6 now THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 entifically even the beds of vegetables had been 
 trained. All the potatoes of the winter, all the 
 celery, all the tomatoes of the summer, and all 
 that Mrs. Holmes and her daughters would can, 
 were the product of this garden. All the poul- 
 try they ate, and all the eggs, came from this 
 hen-house, and they raised enough to pay in 
 simple barter for their milk, which came from a 
 neighbor, who on a similar lot kept a cow, 
 though he had to hire pasturage. We were still 
 surveying the crops when the bell rang for tea. 
 He asked me to take tea with them, and I was 
 glad to do so. It gave me a chance to see the 
 family, all the way down to the little curly- 
 headed girl who sat in a high-chair, and kept 
 the table clear for a small semicircle drawn 
 from that centre. There was a younger boy in 
 the cradle. 
 
 The supper, physically speaking, did credit to 
 Mrs. Holmes and to her daughters. This is not 
 the place to describe that matter. Indeed, the 
 rugged and hearty aspect of the children, who 
 did thorough justice to their mother's provisions 
 and previsions, was what interested me. There 
 was no hurry at table, but " when hunger both 
 and thirst were fully satisfied," we adjourned to 
 the piazza again, and Holmes took up the line of 
 his argument. 
 
 " What I set out to say, when we went out into
 
 CHILDREN S WORK. 1 1 7 
 
 the garden, was this. Suppose I granted to 
 Adam Smith, and the other high-flyers, that La- 
 bor, as they call it, by which they generally 
 mean work, shall be divided to the bottom, if 
 you want to make money. I do not grant it, 
 but suppose I did. Suppose that every egg in 
 the omelette you ate to-night had been bought 
 in Michigan, as on Adam Smith's theory it 
 would and should have been, in the cheapest mar- 
 ket. Suppose even it was as fresh, coming from 
 Michigan. Suppose that honey, which came 
 from Betty's hive, had been brought from De- 
 troit, and had cost a cent a pound less than it 
 has cost me. Suppose every pear which was 
 on that dish could have been bought in Went- 
 worth market cheaper than the money it has 
 cost us to keep up the orchard. Hark you, I 
 do not grant one of these things, but suppose 
 it was so, what am I for, Mr. Freeman .-* What 
 is Clarinda for ? What are we living for ? What 
 is this house for, anyway ? Certainly it is that 
 these children may grow up into strong and good 
 and well men and women. In the long run, that 
 is the thing I have most at heart, and Clarinda. 
 Now let us suppose that since April my radishes 
 and strawberries and raspberries and currants and 
 peas and beans and corn and cauliflower and 
 cabbages and potatoes have cost me a hundred 
 dollars more than they would have cost me in
 
 Il8 now THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 the market, — what should I do with this hun- 
 dred dollars ? Suppose I spent it,- — as observe 
 I have spent it, — on the education of these boys 
 and girls who have worked on this garden, 
 among other things. There are four of them. 
 Where could I have got for one of them, for 
 twenty-five dollars, what I have secured by keep- 
 ing him at work under my eye or his mother's ? 
 
 " But Adam Smith, or even Robert Owen, 
 might tell me that if the older boys and girls 
 were in the factory I should have twelve or even 
 fourteen dollars a week more on the pay-roll 
 every Saturday, and that that goes a great way 
 toward Clarinda's account at the store for flour 
 and butter and meat and shirts and trousers and 
 coats and bonnets and gowns, and above all, for 
 shoes," — and here he laughed at his own enu- 
 meration of man's requisites. 
 
 "There is no doubt of that. And I do not 
 mean to say that eleven hearty children, — for 
 Peter is all the same as our own, — eat nothing. 
 Eleven children like these, Mr. Freeman, eat in a 
 year well-nigh seven barrels of flour, and other 
 things in proportion. Let 'em, says I, — the 
 more they shall have. And I do not pretend 
 that my farm here, as a machine for producing 
 nitrogen and phosphates out of the rain and the 
 sun, compares with the machines out in Dakota 
 which do the same thing. But I do claim, as the
 
 CHILDREN S WORK. I IQ 
 
 patent lawyers say, that, as a machine for training 
 boys and girls into men and women, it is much 
 simpler and much better adapted to the purpose 
 than the complex machine by which Peter works 
 at a loom and earns money to send to Dakota 
 and buy wheat. You see what I mean." 
 
 Yes, I did see very well, and I was glad he had 
 worked it out for himself so well. He wanted 
 to show me his figures, and to please him I looked 
 at them. But I do not copy them here, though 
 I could, because the reader would incredulously 
 think they had been doctored. The truth is, 
 however, that such a spot as Holmes owned, if 
 manured by the foot of the owner, as John Ran- 
 dolph said, becomes more productive than the 
 outsiders think. It was not difficult, in a place 
 like that, to procure the stimulants they wanted 
 for their garden-beds. They had only too much 
 working force, when they needed to plant and 
 to weed ; and the harvesting, as Holmes said, 
 laughing, took care of itself, when the family 
 was to eat the strawberries. The secret of suc- 
 cess, if one spoke of the theory of the thing, was 
 that this very evanescent force which we call la- 
 bor could be applied at any moment when it 
 was wanted, without contract, without wages, 
 without book-keeping ; and something came of 
 it. What came of it I had seen in the eggs and 
 milk and cream and honey and stewed pears on
 
 I20 now TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 the tca-tablo, and had heard of in the potatoes 
 and other vegetables of which lie had told me. 
 
 As to money earnings from the children, 
 Holmes told me what hardly surprised me. He 
 said that all up and down the valley, within 
 three miles of him on either side, the farmers, 
 real farmers, would hire his boys for quite as 
 much as the woollen mills would pay them, at 
 several points between April and November, 
 and that he had rather let them go to such 
 work, for a week or two at a time, than keep 
 them in the mills. "That is what we gain," 
 said he, " by building up these truck farms, as, 
 in fact, our whole system of manufacture does. 
 Somebody must raise the milk and poultry and 
 vegetables for the people at work, not only here, 
 but at Wentworth and at every mill along this 
 stream. You cannot import all that food as 
 readily as you can flour and beef. And it ends 
 in a set of farms, — well, you Western men 
 would not call them farms, but we do, — which 
 supply these needs. Now there are times when 
 these farmers need extra work, and a good deal 
 of it, and then comes the chance for my boys. 
 So they learn two trades, — and that is what 
 every man ought to do. Who is it that says 
 every man must have a vocation and an avoca- 
 tion ? " 
 
 " But you do not make Mr. Freeman under-
 
 CHILDREN S WORK. 121 
 
 Stand the real secret of success," said Mrs. 
 Holmes, " unless you tell him that we own this 
 place, and do not hire it." 
 
 " Oh, I told him that," said her husband, " in 
 my long lecture to him before tea." 
 
 She said that she could illustrate the distinc- 
 tion by telling me one thing. " Here is this vine, 
 which you call so pretty, which is indeed the 
 glory of the front of the house. When we came 
 here, this piazza was as bare and ugly as any 
 which would be found in New England. Now, if 
 we had hired the house, I should have spent 
 twenty-five cents for five papers of seeds. I 
 should have bought morning-glories, and cypress- 
 vine, and what they call cucumber-vine, and coboea, 
 and perhaps some scarlet runners. You see I 
 should have wanted to cover the front as quickly 
 as I could. Instead of this, so soon as I knew I 
 was to stay here, I sent to Mr. Misho's for this 
 one root of Dutchman's pipe, and paid my quarter 
 of a dollar for that. That was years ago. But 
 my piazza is more and more comfortable every 
 summer, with no cost to anybody, while all my 
 morning-glories, and annuals would have been 
 cut down by the first hard frost. I should have 
 saved my seeds, but I should have had to begin 
 again every year." 
 
 Her husband listened, with a sort of pride for 
 the exact fitness of the parable, and said that
 
 122 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 that instance did tell the whole story. " And 
 Clarinda isn't selfish," he said, laughing ; "she 
 isn't half so selfish as the rest of us are. She 
 would simply be doing her duty in buying her 
 annuals. For, if she lived in a hired house, of 
 course it would be her duty to make it look 
 pretty as soon as she could, — in six hours, if 
 she could, or, if not so, in six weeks. For my 
 part, when she sent for her Dutchman, I sent 
 for a Catawba vine. I bought a wheelbarrow 
 load of leather clippings from old Soule around 
 the corner, and treated my land with them. 
 Step round and see the vine with me," he said. 
 "I feed it with waste from the butcher's four 
 times every summer, and now look there." 
 
 He pointed up with pride to the magnificent 
 clusters of grapes, such clusters as civilized man 
 has always taken as the noblest type of plenty 
 and luxury. "There," said Holmes, "who does 
 better than that .-' In theory, you know, I ought 
 to send to Ohio or New York for those, and pay 
 for them in our goods. But, once in a while, I 
 am not sorry to upset Adam Smith in a good 
 exception. My boys made all that trellis, they 
 will pick all the grapes, and they will eat most 
 of them ; there are nearly two hundred clusters 
 in all. But, after all, these are only the orna- 
 ments. The real breadwinner of the place is 
 the hennery yonder, with its machinery for
 
 children's work. 123 
 
 hatching out the Httle chicks." And so we re- 
 turned to the piazza. 
 
 Then there followed a long conversation 
 which I will not try to repeat. Holmes insisted 
 that the sunshine and rain on a man's place was 
 a part of his wealth, which he must invest if he 
 could. Then he said that the muscle and 
 strength and skill of the children was another 
 part of a man's wealth, which must be used, if 
 they were not hurt in the using. But then he 
 fell into a more serious vein. 
 
 " I will not pretend, Mr. Freeman, that these 
 profit and loss reasons are the real reasons why 
 I bring up my children so. These are only my 
 justifications after the fact, as the lawyers would 
 say. You are a Christian man, I hope, and I 
 try to be another. I can say to you, then, what 
 perhaps I would not say at the street corner, — 
 that I want these children of mine to grow up 
 as children of God ; sure of His presence, and 
 happy in His love. I have a notion that if they 
 are in the open air, they feel His presence, and 
 see His work ; that He seems near to them, and 
 they feel near to Him. Anyway, they are with 
 their mother more, and that is the best thing 
 that can happen to them, for we do not have 
 our children any too long. And if, in this open- 
 air life, healthy and free, they do grow up happy 
 and good, why, that is the whole thing. You
 
 124 ^'*^^^' T'lKY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 and I must not be counting coppers or adding 
 up columns of figures, to find out whether one 
 plan is better than another. If it is better for 
 them, that is all." 
 
 And as we went into the house, after I had 
 bidden good by to his wife and the older chil- 
 dren, he said, with a good deal of feeling, " It 
 troubles me a good deal that the men who make 
 laws, and the men who write books, speak as if 
 they thought that a little more profit or a lit- 
 tle more product was the important thing. Of 
 course they do not think so. Of course every 
 one wants more life, — health instead of sick- 
 ness, happiness instead of misery, strength 
 instead of weakness. A Christian state cares for 
 its people, and does not care, except for them, 
 for its things."
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE SCHOOL. 
 
 I REMINDED Spinner one day that he had 
 promised to show me something of the school 
 arrancrements, and he said that if I were willing 
 to take a walk, we would both go down to the 
 school-house, and stop on our way to find Miss 
 Stevens, who was their teacher at that moment, 
 and had been for more than a year. We found 
 an intelligent, wide-awake woman, perhaps thirty- 
 five years old, with a little of the firmness and 
 regularity which comes on people who have kept 
 a school for seventeen years, interested in her 
 work, and willing to talk about it. She said she 
 would take her keys with her, and show us the 
 school-house, though there was, on the whole, 
 very little to show. 
 
 They were District 13 in a large township, 
 and the general school-committee of the town 
 had found it was well to let them carry on things 
 after a rather exceptional way. The district 
 committee ii\ New England has very large powers, 
 and does very much as it chooses, and particu- 
 larly if one member of the district committee
 
 126 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 is a member of the general town committee, the 
 town committee does not mucli interfere with 
 the plans of the district, so only the work required 
 under the statute of the state is done. There 
 is no general law as to hours, there is no general 
 law as to the number of weeks which the school 
 shall be kept open ; all the law requires is that 
 there shall be a school every winter and a school 
 every summer, with a certain minimum beneath 
 which no district must fall, or indeed would be 
 permitted to fall, in the general state of public 
 opinion. These people at Hampton more than 
 complied with the letter of the law, and Miss 
 Stevens assured me that their results were quite 
 as satisfactory as she had found in places where 
 the schools were kept on a more conventional 
 footing. 
 
 The school-house was the old school-house 
 which they had found there, — a perfectly sim- 
 ple building, which might have cost a couple of 
 hundred dollars to build, with one large room 
 only, and a little anteroom, in which the boys 
 and girls hung up their coats and cloaks, and 
 where they left their overshoes. But I noticed 
 that she or somebody had ornamented it prettily 
 with chromos and other pictures ; they had a very 
 good set of school maps hanging upon the walls, 
 and the general aspect of the place was cheerful. 
 I also noticed that the platform at the farther
 
 THE SCHOOL. 12/ 
 
 end of the room was rather higher than I should 
 have made it. But I asked no questions, knowing 
 that "the dumb man's borders still increase." 
 
 Miss Stevens said that she had very little to 
 explain, and, indeed, very little to show. She 
 took me to the end of the room opposite the 
 platform, and threw open a half closet, half cup- 
 board, which was there, and I saw in a moment 
 that it was a sort of alcove, in which they had 
 stored a great many books, — I should think 
 more than a thousand. This, she said, was the 
 school library ; or, if I choose to call it so, a pub- 
 lic library. Mr. Spinner would tell me where 
 they got the money for it, and who had the 
 books. Then she said, laughing, that she was 
 not only the schoolmistress, but she was libra- 
 rian of the library. She opened another closet, 
 and there I saw were crowded in two or three 
 tables, which, she told me, were the reading- 
 room tables ; and she explained to me how they 
 could be brought out, and arranged so as to cover 
 up the desks of her school-children, and serve 
 her for a reading-room in the evening of some 
 of the winter months, when the schoolroom was 
 open for the purpose. " The school-house has 
 to * pay a double debt,' " she said ; "and it is now 
 opera house, now schoolroom, now library, and 
 now reading-room. I am retained by these gen- 
 tlemen in the four capacities of mistress of amuse-
 
 128 now TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 ments, director of reading, librarian, and school- 
 mistress. One of your wise men says that every 
 one should have a vocation and an avocation and 
 a 'third.' I not only have a third, but I have a 
 fourth. But, as another wise man says, I make 
 one hand wash another, and really the boys and 
 girls are very good assistants. There is nothing 
 a bright boy likes better than to be told that he 
 may help in the library, and there is nothing 
 that gives him more self-respect than to be put 
 upon some committee in charge of the news- 
 papers or magazines in the reading-room." 
 
 I listened, well pleased, for the little woman 
 was now talking to me on what is rather a favora- 
 ble topic of my own, and I began asking her a 
 librarian's questions, and other questions which 
 would hardly occur to a person who had not had 
 in hand a set of duties which I have had half my 
 life, but which, with the reader, need not be 
 spoken of. I found that she was in no sort 
 above her business ; on the other hand, she was 
 well disposed to magnify her office, and she gave 
 me some very good hints in administration. 
 But as to the sinews of war, as to the way in 
 which the money was collected and disbursed 
 which all these various enterprises demanded, 
 she always referred me to Mr. Spinner. 
 
 " But if your heart is in it," she said, " and if 
 the people you work for are sympathetic, as the
 
 THE SCHOOL. 1 29 
 
 people are for whom I work, the thing does not 
 require as much money as people imagine, or as 
 it requires on paper; — no, not nearly as much 
 as it requires when you work from above below, 
 as I have seen such work done, when liberal 
 people and generous people were condescending 
 to improve and level up another kind of people. 
 With us, nobody is condescending; we are, if 
 you please, a little selfish. It very soon appears 
 that it is easier to have one of Trollope's novels 
 answer the purpose of twenty of us, or one or 
 two copies of Harper s answer the purpose of a 
 large circle of readers, than if everybody were 
 selfishly keeping the book or the magazine at 
 his own house and occasionally lending it. Very 
 soon, after a year or two, the bound volumes of 
 the magazines became books of the very first 
 interest to children. All children like to follow 
 up a series of bound magazines. They like it 
 rather more than they like anything else. In- 
 deed, Mr. Freeman, the difficult point with a 
 public library is at the beginning. The old prov- 
 erb is certainly true there. Somehow it hap- 
 pens that the first five hundred books you buy 
 are infallibly stupid books. They are the 'books 
 which no gentleman's library should be with- 
 out,' but which might as well be manufactured 
 out of wood and leather, and nailed up perma- 
 nently on the shelves. It is not until you have
 
 130 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 done with the ' standard books,' and begin to 
 suj^ply people with the every-day literature of 
 the time, that they begin to understand that it 
 is worth while to go to the library, and the time 
 when they understand that it is worth while to 
 support the library is even later. But when 
 they have once tasted blood, there is nothing 
 about which a community is so unanimous as it 
 is in the support of its library. Here I make 
 them bring me everything. I make the man 
 who comes up on the train bring me the New 
 York Herald or Tribune of that day, that I may 
 have it on the table of my reading-room. We 
 cannot afford to subscribe for half a dozen dailies. 
 But really, there is not a night when one of my 
 boys cannot pick up a daily at the station as 
 the train passes us, or some one does not bring 
 it in here. Our files would not be very uniform, 
 but we are, all the same, supplied with some- 
 thing, and if people read journals of half a dozen 
 schools in politics, why, it is none the worse for 
 them. In the same way, we have most of our 
 magazines, — not all; some we subscribe for; 
 but I encourage people to send their magazines 
 to me as soon as they have done with them. I 
 promise them that we will bind them, and, after 
 a fashion, we do bind them, though you would 
 think it is rather homely binding. I have taught 
 the girls to do that. And the consequence of all
 
 THE SCHOOL. I3I 
 
 this is, if you should come in here, after the first 
 of October, or before the first of May, you would 
 find, every evening, that my tables are out, that 
 my periodicals are on the tables, and that this 
 little room is quite as full as it will hold, of peo- 
 ple who have come in here to read. Indeed, last 
 year, I was obliged to establish a branch, of which 
 Mr. Spinner will tell you, at the other end of the 
 village, because we were overcrowded here." 
 
 All this entertained me, because it fell in with 
 various plans of my own, which had had more or 
 less success in various localities. Then I asked 
 her about the school hours, and the extent to 
 which she carried her scholars. "As to that," 
 replied Miss Jane Stevens, " the committee is 
 good-natured, and leave me very much to my 
 own devices. When I came here, I found that 
 the school had been very small, and, in fact, be- 
 fore our mill was established, hardly anybody 
 lived in these houses, and very few of those peo- 
 ple who did live here had any children. I had 
 kept school in factory villages before. The gen- 
 eral object in most of them is to crowd the 
 children through the thirteen weeks which are 
 required by law, so that they may have the 
 other nine months to work in the mills ; and the 
 pressure of the parents on the committee, or, 
 generally, of the directors of the mills, is the 
 same way. Then we are a good deal pressed
 
 132 now THEV LIVKU IX HAMPTON. 
 
 and embarrassed often, because the parents are 
 very anxious to get our certificate that the chil- 
 dren have worked through the thirteen weeks, 
 and frequently they ask for the certificate before 
 they have any right to it. Then, if you refuse 
 the certificate, you get into hot water, and alien- 
 ate that family, and perhaps their neighbors. 
 
 " We have none of this difficulty here. Mr. 
 Spinner will tell you how soon he and his 
 friends determined that they would not have 
 any children working in the mills who were not 
 sixteen years old. I suppose that determination 
 made them trouble, but it gave me great joy. I 
 did not insist upon what you would call a city 
 school. I was perfectly willing to fall into the 
 habit of all the country districts here, in having 
 only a winter school or a summer school ; al- 
 though Mr. Spinner was kind enough," she said, 
 nodding to him and smiling, "to let me have 
 my own way in that regard. But I did say that 
 I should like to have the school open for thir- 
 teen full weeks in the winter, and that I should 
 like to have it open for thirteen full weeks in 
 the summer. I ought to explain to you, that I 
 had made an agreement that I would not teach 
 anywhere, else, and that my salary was fixed to 
 run from the first of January to the last of De- 
 cember, so that I was to arrange the school as I 
 thought it best for me and for the community.
 
 THE SCHOOL. 1 33 
 
 I do not think that I was selfish in the matter. 
 There were reasons why it would have been 
 an advantage to me to have had the school 
 open for forty weeks ; but, on the other hand, 
 I was interested in Mr. Spinner's plans and 
 Mr. Workman's plans ; gradually I became ac- 
 quainted with the men and women who work in 
 the mill, and if I were to do it over again, and 
 establish such schools as I wanted in the vil- 
 lages up and down this river, I would not ask 
 for more than twenty-six weeks' work out of the 
 fifty-two, for these boys and girls. 
 
 " I did think, and I said so to these gentle- 
 men, that as we have a good many people who 
 had not had all the school training that they 
 could use to advantage, that it would be a good 
 thing to open the school-house here for an even- 
 ing school during three or four of the winter 
 months. I said that if they were willing to do 
 that, I would be here from half-past six, when 
 supper is always over, to half-past nine. I said 
 that I would not undertake more pupils than I 
 could manage, but that I thought, with the help 
 that I could find, which need not cost a great 
 deal, we could manage perhaps as many as forty 
 pupils in the evening. In point of fact, we had 
 an average of about thirty-five, and that is the 
 way in which my time is divided. 
 
 "There is an evening school, which runs for
 
 134 Jl*^^^'*' 1'H1-V LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 two months late in the autumn. There is a reg- 
 uhir winter sehool, which runs three months. 
 There is an evening school, which runs for two 
 months more in the end of winter and in the 
 spring ; then what they call the summer school 
 comes in in the end of May, and in June and 
 July ; and for the rest there are the holi- 
 days." 
 
 " Tell Mr. Freeman about your Mutual Im- 
 provement Society," said Mr. Spinner. 
 
 " I wanted to tell him about that," Miss Jane 
 Stevens said, "but I think I had a little rather 
 that he should see it first, and I wonder if you 
 cannot bring him around this evening. They 
 do not meet here to-night. They are going to 
 give a sort of exhibition at the other hall. Bring 
 him to that, if he is willing to sit through, and 
 let him see what we do with our native talent 
 here. After the exhibition is over, I will tell 
 him something of the detail of its manage- 
 ment." 
 
 Accordingly, at tea-time in the evening, it 
 was announced that Mr. Spinner and I were 
 going to the evening entertainment provided by 
 the society, and Mrs. Spinner and two or three 
 of the older children went with us. We walked 
 up the village street, and saw that other people 
 were doing the same, to the church, and here I
 
 THE SCHOOL. 135 
 
 found that the entertainment was to be given in 
 the large vestry of the church, which occupied 
 the whole floor of the building, and into which 
 we descended by a few steps, — the floor of the 
 vestry being perhaps three feet below the sur- 
 face of the ground. The room was not very 
 high, but not so low but what we could hear and 
 see easily. It was prettily decorated by well- 
 chosen prints, and a nice frieze of well-drawn 
 pictures illustrating the parables ran all round 
 it just below the wall. I observed, as soon as I 
 went in, that some forty seats were reserved in 
 front. For the rest, the hall perhaps seated a 
 hundred people more, and these seats were all 
 taken before eight o'clock. The announcement 
 had been that the exercises would begin at five 
 minutes after eight, and in a moment I saw the 
 reason for this announcement. Those of the 
 factory hands who chose to come, and who 
 were not released till eight o'clock, had thronged 
 across directly from their work at the mill, ap- 
 parently choosing to postpone their supper until 
 after the entertainment was over, and they oc- 
 cupied the seats which had been reserved for 
 them. So soon as they were all in, the exercises 
 of the evening began. 
 
 A young man, who I should not think was 
 more than twenty-one years old, stepped for- 
 ward and made a bow and said, " Ladies and
 
 1^6 now TllF.Y LIVED IN HAMPTON, 
 
 gentlemen, we have a programme of unusual in- 
 terest to offer you this evening. You will see 
 that preparations have been made for a scientific 
 experiment," — and he turned and pointed to 
 rather a large trough which he had by his side. 
 " At the last meeting of the philosophical sec- 
 tion, Mr. St. John was appointed to tell us 
 why ice floats upon water, and he has pre- 
 pared one or two experiments which will illus- 
 trate this." 
 
 At once a young man stepped up from the 
 floor, and brought his block of ice with him in a 
 basket, showed how high it floated, and then, 
 with various tubs and pumps and other appa- 
 ratus, proceeded to give some simple informa- 
 tion as to the properties of air and water, and 
 what would happen, and what would not hap- 
 pen, etc., in such a way as to interest his audi- 
 ence, and certainly teach some of them some- 
 thing which they did not know before. His 
 statement was very short, and Mr. Spinner told 
 me that no person was permitted to occupy 
 more than five minutes, no matter if he had to 
 demonstrate the most elaborate truths known to 
 science. He was cordially applauded when he 
 had done, and withdrew, leaving his ice floating 
 upon the water. The president again stepped 
 forward, consulted his paper, and said, " Two of 
 the young ladies will favor us with a duet."
 
 THE SCHOOL. 13/ 
 
 Two nice girls came up on the platform, their 
 music was already ready for them on the piano, 
 and they played sufficiently well a duet from 
 Mercadante. 
 
 " Mr. John Graham will read an anecdote." 
 Mr. John Graham proved to be an old Scotch- 
 man, I should think sixty years old. He came 
 up with a book in his hand, and said he was 
 going to read a story, which should not have 
 been called an anecdote, by Fontenelle. I do 
 not know where he found it ; I had never heard 
 it before, and I never heard it since, but it was 
 one of Fontenelle's nice little stories, with a 
 clever moral. It was read in a very pathetic 
 way, and held the audience for Mr. John Gra- 
 ham's five minutes. And so this " variety enter- 
 tainment " went on, without the slightest pause 
 or breakdown. Sometimes the contributions 
 were made by little children of seven years 
 old, sometimes by their fathers or their grand- 
 fathers. They passed from grave to gay, or 
 from gay to grave, with apparently no prevision 
 nor arrangement of contrast or similarity, but by 
 the mere accident which had placed them upon 
 the programme. But what was important was, 
 that they interested the audience, they were curi- 
 ously suggestive, and they must have started con- 
 versation and thought, as hardly any elaborate 
 lecture could have done.
 
 138 HOW TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 I could not make Spinner understand how 
 curious I thought the whole thing. He did not, 
 indeed, look at it quite as I did. He looked at 
 it rather as something of course, which had 
 grown up quite naturally out of the exercises at 
 the Sunday-school, and out of the school exhibi- 
 tions. He gave Miss Jane Stevens the principal 
 credit of it, and, after it was over, she walked 
 home with us, and I tried to make her give me 
 some idea of the way in which all these people had 
 been brought to be their own teachers and their 
 own entertainers upon a public stage. She said 
 that she did not think anybody had planned 
 these entertainments, but that they had grown 
 up simply enough out of a little society of 
 boys and girls, which had formed itself when 
 these young people were all five years younger 
 than they were now. They had had, as most 
 villages had, the usual run of fourth-rate lectur- 
 ers coming up and charging money for their 
 entertainments, till they had got tired of such 
 things. She was, in the meanwhile, trying to 
 interest them in the reading-room and in the 
 library, but she found that they wanted to get 
 together ; they wanted to have a chance to talk 
 and to walk home together, and she had pro- 
 posed that there should be two or three little 
 entertainments, conducted by themselves, at the 
 end of every evening. But it proved that it was
 
 THE SCHOOL. 139 
 
 much easier to arrange for a field meeting of the 
 society once a fortnight than it was to be get- 
 ting up Httle separate entertainments more fre- 
 quently, and gradually the thing had assumed 
 the shape which I saw. Of course, those who 
 could sing had a certain commodity which they 
 could always offer at these entertainments ; but 
 it was her business, and the business of the 
 other leaders of the society, to find out what 
 contribution other people could bring in. The 
 men of a more mechanical gift were rather 
 pleased if something which they had read in 
 the Scientific American, or in the other jour- 
 nals, could be made of use to their fellow work- 
 men. Occasionally, a stranger was at hand ; 
 but, generally speaking, she had found that 
 strangers did not understand their audience as 
 well as they understood it themselves. A dec- 
 lamation always interested these audiences, but 
 it would not have interested them if it had been 
 the declamation of a professional reader from 
 the outside ; it interested them because they 
 listened to theii own sons or their own daugh- 
 ters. "And in short," said Miss Jane Ste- 
 vens, " in all our effort to provide amusement 
 for our winter evenings, there is nothing on the 
 whole which is so popular as this entertainment 
 of the Mutual Improvement Society, and that you 
 may guess, now that you see it in the autumn,
 
 140 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 and if I tell you it has been kept up throughout 
 the year. For the rest," she said, "we make 
 quite a point of keeping up the musical training 
 of the village. When I say we, I mean I and 
 Mrs. Spinner and Mrs. Workman and the doc- 
 tor, and two or three other people, on whom the 
 stress of the effort comes ; but with every year 
 we have more and more helpers. Mr. Spinner 
 will tell you that we have quite the beginning of 
 a little band. You heard how well those two 
 girls played, and how well that quartette of boys 
 sang ; and really, last winter, our six or eight 
 concerts were not only a pleasure to those who 
 heard, but were really creditable to the perform- 
 ers." I asked her whether I had now found out 
 the secret of the high platform in her school- 
 room, and she said I had. She said that when 
 they did not think they should have a large 
 audience, the children felt more at home in 
 the schoolroom, and that she had many a time 
 met small companies of them there, when they 
 should never have thought of announcing an en- 
 tertainment in the vestry of the church. " But 
 here," said she, "we can act charades, we can 
 speak dialogues, we can tell stories. Why, I 
 have read them half the Arabian Nights here, 
 when they were sewing or knitting, or the boys 
 were drawing at the table yonder. Indeed, 
 they are never more pleased than they are to
 
 THE SCHOOL. I4I 
 
 have what they call an evening in the school- 
 house ; but that is purely an informal thing, as 
 they might meet for an evening party at Mr. 
 Spinner's house, or at Mr. Workman's."
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 HOURS OF WORK. 
 
 MR. SPINNER explained to me their ex- 
 periment about the hours of work in a 
 long conversation of which I took full notes at 
 the time. 
 
 "You will easily see that matters of some dif- 
 ficulty under any other system of management 
 settle into matters of detail with us, and adjust 
 themselves. 
 
 "Workman and I had both been anxious and 
 interested in eight-hour plans. But we knew 
 enough to know that if one state in America 
 passed an eight-hour law, and the next did not, 
 the result would be simply the driving factories 
 and workmen across the border, and that no- 
 body would gain anything. So that, though I 
 have agitated a good deal of that thing in gen- 
 eral, I had never seen any good chance in detail. 
 Our system here differs from anything I had 
 heard of, and it came to us, as such things do, 
 rather by accident than studied design. 
 
 "I was in New York, — it was in April, — the
 
 HOURS OF WORK. I43 
 
 end of April, — and I met a jobber there whom I 
 had not seen before, a Boston man named Atkins. 
 He took a fancy to some goods he had bought 
 from an agent and made an appointment to see 
 me. He told me that his people, — some tailors 
 he dealt with, — liked the goods, and he wanted 
 to know how large a lot I could send him steadily 
 for six months. I figured on it a little, and told 
 him. I saw he was disappointed, — a little an- 
 noyed, I thought. It was the first intimation he 
 had had that we were not one of the great slam- 
 bang concerns, to whom a hundred million pieces 
 are nothing at all. When I saw this, — I hated 
 to disappoint a good customer, — I said, ' Either 
 that, — or twice that.' 
 
 " He asked what I meant, and I said I would 
 light up, and run two sets of hands. 
 
 " Well, he did not care what I did. If I had 
 set the mill afire, he would not have cared, so 
 his tailors were suited. He accepted my first 
 price, and I came home a good deal fright- 
 ened, to tell Workman and the rest what I had 
 done. I do not run this mill by caucus. No 
 sir ! I do as I choose, and make the plans ; and 
 other men do their parts, and the plans come 
 out as well as they can. But this time I did 
 call the heads of rooms into my counting-room, 
 — what you would call ' foremen,' — and I said 
 that we had a chance to double profit if we
 
 144 '"*^^' T'lKV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 wou\d double work, — and that I had done this 
 thing. But I said that I hated night work. 
 It was demorahzing ; it was bad for the men 
 and women engaged ; and the work itself was 
 bad when it was done. I said that if we had 
 won any credit with these unknown tailors, it 
 had been by doing work a little better than 
 other people did, and that we should very soon 
 lose that credit if we did not keep up to the stan- 
 dard of the goods they had received from us. 
 Then it was, that, on a hint from one of the 
 men, we tried, rather as an experiment, the 
 system on which we have run this mill ever 
 since. There is a certain freemasonry about 
 weavers and spinners. They know of other 
 weavers and spinners, just as jewellers know of 
 other jewellers, and printers of other printers. 
 I gave out word that, beginning with a fort- 
 night from the next Monday, we were going 
 for the summer on the eight-hour principle. 
 At the same time, I gave out word that the 
 mill would open at four o'clock in the morn- 
 ing, and that the people who came to work 
 then would be dismissed at twelve for that day. 
 There was not to be any cessation of the work, 
 however. The power was to be kept on and 
 the machinery kept running, and another set 
 of hands would come in at twelve and work 
 till eight in the evening. I do not believe the
 
 HOURS OF WORK. I45 
 
 thing could have been done so easily in a large 
 establishment as it was with us. But the men 
 and women wrote all up and down the valley, 
 to friends that were in other mills, who wanted 
 to make an easy summer of it, and before my 
 fortnight was over, I had people enough troop- 
 ing in here, who wanted to be taken on this 
 rather luxurious arrangement. You will see 
 yourself that the trouble is in the inspection 
 of the work more than it is in the doing of 
 the work. Nobody likes to be responsible for 
 work done in his room, of which he did not 
 see every detail; but the heads of rooms man- 
 aged that after a fashion. They worked much 
 more than eight hours, and they had head men 
 of their own, whom they liked, and in whom 
 they had some confidence, whom they put in 
 charge in their absence. Then, as you will 
 easily see, under our principle, where each man 
 has something of the interest of an owner, there 
 is a great deal more mutual oversight than there 
 would be in a room where everything was cut- 
 throat and every spinner was trying to do as 
 little as he could, so he could only be paid for 
 doing more. Then you would find that a girl 
 who tended a frame, made, by methods known 
 to herself, some private arrangement, so that 
 another girl whom she knew, — perhaps her 
 sister or some friend of hers, somebody who
 
 146 HOW TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 lived in the same house with her, — should 
 tend that same frame in the afternoon. There 
 is not much sentiment about a spinning-frame, 
 but there is some, and a girl would not like to 
 come in in the morning and find things amiss, 
 when an entire stranger had been running her 
 machine, while she would be good-natured 
 enough about it, if the person who had run it 
 was her own protegee, or in some way was her 
 friend. 
 
 "So it was that for that summer we ran this 
 mill sixteen hours where we had run it ten 
 hours before. It did not quite double the time, 
 but, in truth, although it did not quite double 
 the work, it came nearer it than I expected. 
 We had not the difficulty which everybody 
 told me we should have, of the machinery get- 
 ting out of order, because nobody was responsi- 
 ble for it. It ended in our holding a person 
 responsible for a piece of cloth who began 
 that piece. This was not strictly fair, but it 
 was so evident that there must be some rule 
 about it, that everybody accepted that rule. In 
 point of fact, the cloth stood inspection remark- 
 ably well, and, after a little fuss at the begin- 
 ning, I never found that anybody pretended 
 that he could tell the difference between work 
 which was done in the afternoon and work which 
 was done in the morning, or vice versa.
 
 HOURS OF WORK. 147 
 
 " I suppose there was a difference, but it was 
 one of those minute kinds of differences which 
 you lawyers say the law does not care about. 
 The upshot of it all was that I held my contract 
 with this Boston man, who has been one of our 
 best customers ever since. 
 
 " But when it came to the first of November, 
 we stopped this double business. In the first 
 place, our contract was up, and in the second 
 place, I and Workman and all the best heads of 
 rooms were resolute that we would not have any 
 night work. Of course, by the first of Novem- 
 ber, we were burning a good deal of oil, morning 
 and night, — that was before we got in our elec- 
 tric plant, — and the oil was an expense. It hap- 
 pened that year that I had just as lief run light 
 as not. I was satisfied that the country was 
 making more goods than it could sell, and I did 
 not want to be found with an overstock in the 
 spring. The men and women both had got used 
 to the eight hours' work, arid I told them all that 
 I proposed to try as an experiment to run this 
 mill, for the next four months, at only eight 
 hours' time. This meant, you see, beginning 
 after it was broad daylight, and ending at sun- 
 down, or sometimes before. We made the sav- 
 ing in oil, which is something ; we made some 
 saving, I suppose, though not much, in fuel ; and 
 the people made a great deal of saving in tem-
 
 148 now TIIKV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 per. I lost some workmen, — there is no doubt 
 of that. Tliey went off where they could get 
 more money ; for practically, all our people are 
 paid by the piece, and of course a man cannot 
 make so many pieces of woollen cloth in forty- 
 eight hours as he can in sixty. It is all non- 
 sense to pretend that he can. But he makes 
 more than forty-eight sixtieths ; he makes more 
 than eight-tenths of it. When his mind is set 
 to it, and he is determined to drive things, and 
 he has time to keep his machinery in good order, 
 and does not mind staying a little before and 
 after work to see to that, his eight hours are 
 worth more to him than when he is in a hurry 
 to leave his work as soon as it is done, and is 
 only eager to come in late in the morning. You 
 will say that this is an advantage which wears 
 off after people have been used to the eight- 
 hours system. All I can say is, it does not wear 
 off with us. On the other hand, we find that 
 these people regard their machinery a good deal 
 as you regard a horse which has got to do so 
 much work for you. You would like to have 
 the horse in as good order as he can be in, and 
 even if you have to take care of him yourself, 
 you would rather do that than have him fail 
 you when you are in the saddle or going over 
 the hills. 
 
 " What we have settled down on, then, is eight
 
 HOURS OF WORK. I49 
 
 hours' time from the first of November to the 
 first of March every year, and during tliat period 
 we give a full hour for dinner. I do not say 
 that the people would like it all the year round. 
 I think that in the summer men would have a 
 feeling that they were wasting time, and that 
 they would leave us, and go off to places where 
 they could get more money in the day or more 
 money in the week. But the human mind is so 
 formed that people do like variety. It is just as 
 a woman wants to move her bedstead once in 
 six months, and is sure she makes more room 
 every time she moves it. These people are 
 glad when the first of November comes and the 
 hours of work are radically changed ; and they 
 are just as glad when the first of March comes, 
 and they are changed again. It gives us, as you 
 will see, a good chance for our evening school, 
 of which we make a good deal ; and it gives a 
 good chance for our evening entertainments, 
 which are very good for keeping up the moral 
 life of the people. It throws men more into the 
 library and reading-room than it would if they 
 were tired, and, in short, I think it a very good 
 arrangement for the summer, and I am disposed 
 to think that the men agree with me. 
 
 " I wonder if you remember a droll paper there 
 is of Franklin's, about his discovering that it 
 was light in Paris three or four hours before
 
 150 now THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 people got out of bed. I remember a man I 
 knew, who went to Spain on business, told me 
 how much surprised, not to say amused, he was 
 when he saw, in the city of Madrid, the masons 
 were at work before five o'clock in the morning, 
 on a house opposite his hotel ; and he saw the 
 other side of it when he saw that the same 
 masons did not touch a brick between half-past 
 eleven in the middle of the day and half-past 
 three. Well, if you turn out with fifty or sixty 
 people, as I have done again and again now for 
 years, at four o'clock in the morning, just when 
 a few streaks are beginning to light up the 
 eastern sky, it may be, and go into the mill with 
 those people, and all get to work just as it is 
 beginning to be light enough to go to work, you 
 have a little that same feeling that my friend 
 had in Spain ; you have a little of the feeling 
 that Franklin describes in this paper. You are 
 a little surprised to know that you are at work 
 when half the world is asleep, and you do not 
 dislike the surprise. Least of all do you dislike 
 it when, at twelve o'clock, somebody else comes 
 in and takes your work. You have the liberty 
 of a marquis, or a duke, or anybody else. You 
 go to sleep if you want to ; you can read ; you 
 can go a-fishing. I daresay you have met some 
 of my men with their baskets and flies upon the 
 streams that you have been tracking. It does
 
 HOURS OF WORK. I5I 
 
 the man no harm, you may be sure of that ; and 
 he comes home, with his feet wet, if you please, 
 and pretty tired, quite ready to go to bed at sun- 
 down, or before sundown, that he may be at his 
 work at four in the morning. 
 
 "There is no doubt that with the men and the 
 women too, the early rising watch, for that is 
 what we call them, is the more agreeable of the 
 two ; so we change and change about when 
 Sunday comes. Watch A, as it is called on our 
 books, has the morning work for one week, and 
 it takes the afternoon work in the next week. 
 Then, when the third week comes, Watch A has 
 the morning again, and in the fourth week it 
 has the afternoon again, and we did not change 
 this order of watches from the beginning of the 
 season till the end. But as to the men and 
 women in the watches, they have a good deal of 
 liberty. They have what they call their part- 
 ners ; by which I mean that two people, as I 
 have said, are in some sort responsible for the 
 same frame or the same loom, and if one of 
 those partners wants a half day off, and makes a 
 bargain with his partner to run for him, we wink 
 at it, if you choose to call it wink at it ; we 
 know perfectly well that it is done, and once in 
 a long while we permit that substitution. I 
 should not, if I were the head of a room, permit 
 it two days running. Sixteen hours' work is
 
 152 HOW THF.Y LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 quite too much to be done two days, unless 
 there is to be a holiday the next day. But, as 
 you know, the work at a frame or at a loom is 
 not so much physical fatigue as it is a certain 
 kind of nervous work ; and once in a dog's age 
 such a thing as this may be permitted, though 
 it should never be encouraged. Now all this, as 
 you will see, links in with, and has direct refer- 
 ence to the system of schooling which we have 
 adopted here, which is, after all, largely bor- 
 rowed from the English experience, and about 
 which you had better talk with the young wo- 
 men who keep the schools. 
 
 " It is easy to see how the footings come out 
 from these rather varied hours. 104 days of 
 .winter, at 8 hours each, give 832 hours' work. 
 
 " For the eight months of spring, summer, 
 and autumn, the mills do twice as much a 
 day, and the result, of course, of the eight 
 months, is four times that of the winter, or 832 
 X 4, equals 3328. 
 
 "This makes 4160 hours' work in a year, 
 against 3100 hours which we should have gained 
 from 310 days' work on a ten-hour system. 
 
 " The law of this state restricts us to ten 
 hours, and if it did not, the fact that other 
 states are restricted to ten hours would have 
 amounted to the same thing. In the long run, 
 you cannot keep good workmen in an eleven-
 
 HOURS OF WORK. 153 
 
 hour mill, when, by going over the border, they 
 have a chance to work in a ten-hour mill. It is 
 that which practically settles these questions, 
 though there can be, of course, under our con- 
 stitution, no national legislation on the subject. 
 " It ought to be understood, indeed, that no 
 state constitution gives any right to the legisla- 
 ture to fix the hours of labor for any man. The 
 arrangements for ten-hour systems, or other 
 such systems, are made practically by legislation 
 for the benefit of children, with regard to whom 
 it is supposed that the legislature is omnipotent. 
 When an eight-hour law is passed, as it has 
 been passed, by Congress, it is simply a law pro- 
 viding that men who work for the government 
 shall work only for eight hours in every twenty- 
 four. But the Bill of Rights in most states 
 would be enough to show that a legislature must 
 not interfere with the right of a man to sell in 
 market his own labor, and as much of it as he 
 chooses, I say this merely by the way. It is 
 not of any great practical effect, because, prac- 
 tically, most mills want to employ persons who 
 are under age, and if those persons may, or in- 
 deed must, go away at the end of ten hours, the 
 work of the mill is so far deranged that it can- 
 not be continued for eleven hours. This is the 
 whole of our ten-hour statutes, and indeed the 
 same is true with regard to those in En<4:land.
 
 154 J^^'^^' TIIEV LIVED IX HAMPTON. 
 
 " But, as I have said, our arrangements here 
 were wholly independent of statute. They grevv 
 up in the incidental way which I have described, 
 but which, for us who want to make the most 
 out of this plant here, — that is, out of these 
 buildings and this machinery, — is, as you can 
 see, very great. We gain thirty-three per cent in 
 product out of the same amount of machinery. 
 Our work-people are satisfied, and if they are 
 satisfied, everybody is satisfied. We pay by the 
 piece, as all mills do, so that we pay no more 
 for three thousand hours' work on our time cal- 
 endar than if we were carrying the same three 
 thousand hours over more months in the year. 
 
 " Practically, then, we are able to deliver more 
 goods in a year than we were able to, or than 
 we should be, if we worked on a ten-hour sys- 
 tem. We are also using our machinery, not to 
 the full top of its work, but for one-third more 
 than we should be otherwise, and this gives us 
 so far forth a better chance to be even with the 
 time. It is a great thing for any manufacturer 
 to work with the newest machinery which the 
 progress of invention affords, and, other things 
 being equal, there is therefore a certain advan- 
 tage in wearing out a frame or a loom in three 
 years which otherwise would have run four."
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE CHURCH. 
 
 SUNDAY came around while I was at 
 Hampton, and I went to church with Mr. 
 Spinner, his wife and family. He told me at 
 breakfast that we should hear the Baptist min- 
 ister from VVentworth, who was coming up to 
 take the morning service himself. Mr. Spinner 
 spoke with pleasure of this arrangement, for he 
 said I should be pleased with the sermon and 
 the service, and he hoped that this gentleman 
 would come first and dine with us. " He has 
 not been here," said Mr. Spinner, "for a year or 
 two, and I should be glad to show him some of 
 our improvements. He is a man who is much 
 liked in the whole county, and it is rather a 
 matter of distinction that we should have him at 
 our little church here." 
 
 He then told me of the basis on which the 
 church had arranged itself, and seemed to be, 
 on the whole, well pleased that they had been 
 able to do as much as they had done, although 
 they had met with the difficulties inevitable 
 where there are people coming and going all the
 
 156 HOW TllKY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 time, where many of the men and women are, if 
 not irrehgious, quite indifferent to reUgious ar- 
 rangements, and where the whole community is 
 so small that unless it unite together in some 
 way it is difficult to maintain any regular 
 church institution. 
 
 " When we came here," he said, " there was 
 no place of worship here at all. There is a Sec- 
 ond-Advent meeting-house three or four miles 
 down the road, and I think you may have no- 
 ticed, as you went up, a meeting-house which is 
 almost never used, which was built by some 
 Seventh-Day Baptist people several years ago, 
 when they had a revival in this neighborhood. 
 But they all moved away, and I hardly know 
 whether their house is kept in repair or not. At 
 all events, it was too far away from us for us to 
 make any use of it. In truth, one of the reasons 
 of the failure of the enterprise that was here 
 before us was that our village was not large 
 enough to maintain a church. The more decent 
 workmen would not come to a place where there 
 was no church, and they had but a wretched set 
 of hands here at the very best. The quality of 
 their work-people alone was enough to break 
 down their mills, if they had not broken down 
 from bad management, as in fact they did. Af- 
 ter we were established here, the better men, 
 themselv^es, felt the need of doing something for
 
 THE CHUKCH. I 5/ 
 
 Sunday-school or a place of worship, in many- 
 instances where they had never cared for such 
 things before. Nothing puts a man so much on 
 his mettle as being bodily transplanted, and find- 
 ing that there is no regular occupation for Sun- 
 day, even if he have not been a regular church 
 member himself, and affects to be indifferent to 
 such things. The Catholic priest at Wentworth 
 was quite willing to come up and hear confessions 
 and carry on a service once in a month, and he 
 did so in the school building, which the district 
 committee were willing to let him have for this 
 purpose. Different men put themselves into 
 communication with one and another of the 
 ministers at Wentworth, to know whether some 
 service could not be maintained, perhaps on 
 Sunday evening, or perhaps in the afternoon, 
 by one and another person coming up the 
 valley from there. To these proposals we 
 had all sorts of answers, as we always would 
 in such a case, but it seemed to me that 
 there was enough of a necessity made out for 
 me to address a pretty formal letter to Mr. 
 Nourse on the subject, and that letter I 
 accordingly wrote. 
 
 " I told him that it was essential to a good 
 manufacturing establishment to have the best 
 workmen and not the wonst. I told him that 
 we should never have the more decent and self-
 
 158 HOW THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 respecting workmen, if there were these difficul- 
 ties about worship. I told him that it seemed 
 to me therefore that the men who owned this 
 mill, and he was the most important of those 
 men, should add to the rest of their plant here 
 a church or meeting-house. That would show 
 the men that they employed that they had an 
 interest in this matter. For the rest, the men 
 they employed must bear out the American 
 principle, and must arrange for worship as best 
 they could ; but that I thought that, without 
 analyzing the matter too finely, or putting too 
 fine a point upon things, it was the business 
 of capital to provide a place where this part of 
 the work of a manufacturing town should be 
 carried on. 
 
 " I got a very curious answer from Nourse. 
 I should like to show it to you. He reminded 
 me of the principle which had been laid down 
 in the beginning ; namely, that capital was to 
 have merely what we would call 'the idiot's 
 dividend,' and that in a certain sense it was 
 entitled to that, while in a certain sense it was 
 not entitled to anything more. * Now,' said he, 
 'we have waived all questions of sentiment or 
 mutual affection or of the interest of mankind, 
 which you choose now to bring up when you 
 discuss the matter of a church edifice. I do 
 not mean to say that if, half an hour hence,
 
 THE CHURCH. I59 
 
 a man comes into my room, and takes off his 
 hat, and asks me to subscribe for building a 
 church in Honolulu or in Texas, I may not 
 doit; but I do not think that .that man must 
 come to me from Hampton. In Hampton I am 
 engaged in a business enterprise. I have been 
 told that this business enterprise could pay me 
 what we call the idiot's dividend. I feel safe, 
 therefore, about refusing to mix up a business 
 enterprise like this with my philanthropy. If 
 you, and the men who are at work with you, 
 really think that a church is as much a part 
 of the capital stock of this concern as is the 
 dyeing vat, you ought to prove this by your 
 works. I own some dyeing vats in your mills, 
 or I own ninety-five hundredths of them, and 
 on my property in those vats I am paid four per 
 cent interest. I will put up for you in Hamp- 
 ton a meeting-house on exactly those terms. 
 It shall be costly or inexpensive, as you please. 
 It shall be a handsome church, built of your 
 own stone there, by the best architect in New 
 York, or it shall be built of rough-hewn planks, 
 slabs, and shingles, just as you please. It shall 
 cost fifty thousand dollars, or it shall cost five 
 hundred, just as you please ; but the congrega- 
 tion that worship in it on Sunday, and the 
 people who use it for other services on week 
 days, shall pay me the idiot's dividend, or shall
 
 l6o HOW TllKV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 pay the proprietors a dividend, exactly as they 
 pay them on the dyeing vats.' 
 
 " He said we might keep this offer open for 
 two months, and he would be bound by it at the 
 end of the time. 
 
 " I read this aloud at a meeting which we 
 held in the store to consider it. All the men 
 were pleased with it, or almost all of them were. 
 They said it meant business, and they were 
 rather flattered by the half confidence that it 
 placed in them. They appointed a committee 
 to go to Wentworth and Tenterdon. Eventually, 
 the committee went as far as New Haven to 
 see some plans, and it all ended in our build- 
 ing this place which we are going to to-day. 
 We got a plan from the Methodists ; they pub- 
 lish some very good plans and some very cheap 
 plans, and we never had to pay an architect 
 a cent, because they furnished us, very good- 
 naturedly, the plan which we have adopted. 
 The building was made from our lumber here, 
 and it cost a little inside of three thousand 
 dollars. It stands on our books as having cost 
 twenty-nine hundred dollars. In this case we 
 pay the idiot's dividend, exactly as we pay it 
 on the other capital stock of the concern. In 
 fact, it is an enlargement of the capital stock 
 by twenty-nine hundred dollars, and Mr. Nourse 
 owns the whole of this, whereas he only owns
 
 THE CHURCH. l6l 
 
 ninety-five per cent of the rest of the stock. 
 You see, then, that whoever occupies this 
 church has to pay one hundred and sixteen 
 dollars a year for rent to him. They also have 
 to pay something — not much — for its insur- 
 ance. One hundred and sixteen dollars a year 
 is rather more than two dollars a week \ and 
 the committee who had it in charge deter- 
 mined very soon that the rent of the church 
 and of the vestry, for any and every pur- 
 pose for which it was used, should be one 
 dollar a day. They thought, and it has proved 
 that they thought rightly, that they should be 
 almost certain of renting the church fifty-two 
 times in the year for Sunday services. Thus 
 they would have fifty-two dollars. Then they 
 thought, and as it proved they thought rightly, 
 that there would be so many occasions when 
 the vestry was wanted for a public hall, as you 
 saw it was wanted the other night when they 
 had the entertainment there, that they should 
 get from that sixty or seventy dollars more. In 
 point of fact, they have always had enough to 
 keep the building in repair, keep it warm, and 
 to pay for their lights in the evening. The 
 occupation evenings costs a little more than the 
 occupation on Sunday, because the lights have 
 to be provided for ; but we have water power 
 running to waste here, so that since we got in
 
 l62 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 our electric plant, the light really costs them 
 very little, and indeed, blessings to kerosene, 
 it never cost them a great deal." 
 
 Accordingly, when Sunday afternoon came, 
 the family mustered in great force for the ser- 
 vice. Mr. Sherlock arrived late — but came. 
 I had gone with the children and my host him- 
 self to a Sunday-school in the morning, which 
 was largely attended by grown people as well as 
 children, and required the use of many parts of 
 the church itself, as well as of the large and 
 small rooms in the vestry. Spinner explained 
 to me as we went, that for a service with a ser- 
 mon all the committees found it more conven- 
 ient, as they had no settled minister, to take 
 the afternoon, or, as on this occasion, the after- 
 noon and the evening. For, with this arrange- 
 ment, they could often secure the presence and 
 service of clergymen whom they liked to hear, 
 from the large towns in the neighborhood, who 
 could not arrange to be absent from their own 
 pulpits in the morning. This Mr. Sherlock, who 
 was to preach, was a general favorite. He would 
 not have come to them at all, however, had he 
 been needed in the morning, for he was then 
 engaged in the service of his own church. 
 
 Spinner's son George, and his daughter Pru- 
 dence had both been trained, as it proved, to 
 write in shorthand, and they told me that they
 
 THE CHURCH. 1 63 
 
 had notes of most of the sermons which had 
 been preached in the church now for two or 
 three years. When I found that Mr. Sherlock 
 spoke without a manuscript, I was glad that the 
 young people were preserving his sermon. For 
 thus I was able to bring away what is a good 
 report of it, which I made them write out for 
 me. I copy it here, because he had caught, very 
 thoroughly, the notion which was at the bottom 
 of the various plans at Hampton, and the ser- 
 mon states some principles of that notion, as 
 I may not succeed in stating them elsewhere. 
 
 The text was : " Bear ye one another's bur- 
 dens, and so fulfil the law of Christ." 
 
 I think you must have noticed, when I read 
 the New Testament lesson, that in the same ap- 
 peal Paul bids every man bear his own burden. 
 It is almost in one breath that he says that 
 every man must bear his own burden and that 
 every man must bear his brother's burden. 
 Now it will not do for a moment to suppose 
 that this is a matter of thoughtless rhetoric, — 
 or that these two injunctions may be separated 
 out from each other, and taken each for itself 
 alone. You will not find any thoughtless rhet- 
 oric in this man's injunctions, — no, not when 
 he is in the highest heaven. This man Paul is 
 a master of life. He understood the ffreat sci-
 
 164 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 encc of living through and through. Because 
 he understands it, — because he knows what he 
 is talking about, — though he has only a few 
 years for his work, — though he goes from place 
 to place, now as a prisoner, now as a travelling 
 tent-maker, — he changes all Europe from what 
 it was to what it is. He makes the Western 
 World over, because he has the practical power 
 to inspire it with the Divine Life. Such a man 
 does not talk by accident, or for immediate ef- 
 fect. He has a principle beneath every word he 
 uses. And you and I must not take one of his 
 practical injunctions without allying it with the 
 others, and studying them together. 
 
 You will find, then, all through, that this great 
 leader of men speaks as a workman speaks to 
 other workmen. He tells us always, — what in 
 one central text he says in one epigram, — 
 that we are fellow-workmen together with God. 
 As the Saviour had said, "My Father worketh 
 hitherto, and I work," Paul takes it for granted 
 that all who make any claim to take the Saviour's 
 name mean to work in the world into which they 
 were born. They are not to dream out their 
 salvation, — nor to talk their salvation into each 
 other, — nor to argue it out, — nor to buy it with 
 a great price, — they are to work it out. He 
 speaks as a workman to workmen. And he 
 takes care all along that they shall know that
 
 THE CHURCH, 165 
 
 he is a workman, and that he is not ashamed of 
 his work. " Mine own hands ministered to my 
 necessities," he says, and never fails to remind 
 them that, by example of daily industry, he has 
 illustrated what he means, when he says so 
 quaintly, and even sharply, that every man must 
 mind his own business. 
 
 Speaking in this way, as a man who knows 
 what work is, who has been bred to a good 
 trade at which he can earn a living, Paul, the 
 most practical of leaders of men, is engaged in 
 this chapter in telling these people the wonders 
 of the great word "Together." How this little 
 handful of men is to rule and govern the world, 
 because no man is alone, but We act, — made 
 perfect in union, or, as the Saviour said, made 
 perfect in one. Of this instruction, the text is 
 the central statement, as you saw when I read 
 the passage. But he is wholly determined that 
 each man shall know his personal responsibility. 
 No man is to undertake that vague, smoky, gen- 
 eral, noisy philanthropy, which disgraces the word 
 philanthropy, — in which a religious tramp an- 
 nounces that he will save the world, when he 
 cannot say what is his own special place and 
 part in the world's salvation. Paul will not let 
 any man think he can sing well enough to sing 
 in the chorus, unless he can sing well enough 
 when it is his place to sing a solo. And no man
 
 l66 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 is to come to him and say, "Paul, I should like a 
 commission to go out to the world and reform 
 the world, and quicken it with a new life," unless 
 that man can show Paul that he has a work of 
 his own that he can do, — has a place of his own 
 that he fills well, — or, as he puts it in better 
 words, unless this man shows that he can bear 
 his own burden. 
 
 No sceptic or scoffer made any point by turn- 
 ing on Paul after one of his addresses, to say, 
 "Who are you to be lecturing us about industry, 
 or sobriety, or patience in work .'' You are hear- 
 ing your own voice, and you like to hear it. Try 
 hard work, and see how you like that." No man 
 said that to Paul, for they knew what the answer 
 would be. "Who am I.'* I am a tent-maker. 
 Come down to Narrow Street, and see if there 
 is better tent-cloth in Corinth than I have there, 
 — or if there is a better shelter-tent than I made 
 yesterday." He knew how to bear his own bur- 
 den, and so he knew how to bear the burdens of 
 the world. 
 
 I will take another occasion, if your com- 
 mittee are so good as to ask me to Hampton 
 again, to show by separate passages from Paul's 
 letters how distinct is the instruction he gives 
 to any young workingman who wants to suc- 
 ceed, and means to succeed, as to the method
 
 THE CHURCH. 16/ 
 
 of his daily life. He does not simply say that 
 every man shall bear his own burden, but, in 
 one practical instruction and another, he shows 
 him how. But not to-day. Our business to-day 
 is with the other text. How a man shall do his 
 part as a member of the common family — what 
 people now call the community. How shall a 
 man show his public spirit — do his share in the 
 public or common life .■' How and where shall a 
 Christian man appear as a good citizen of the 
 state or as a good member of the church .■• 
 
 First, and very briefly, because this is to be 
 the whole subject of that other sermon, — let 
 him know how to do his own work well. Let 
 him be no pretender. How shall he offer him- 
 self for the world's service, if his own house is 
 not in order .-' I am greatly interested in the 
 men and women who help Paul. There is a 
 man of whom we know nothing but that he was 
 once Paul's amanuensis, and that Paul was fond 
 of him. " I, Tertius, who wrote this epistle," 
 he says, with a certain pride. There was a man 
 who knew how to write. He knew how to spell 
 well. Paul was troubled with his weak eyes, 
 they say, and was glad when Tertius volun- 
 teered. But he would not have been glad had 
 Tertius been a pretender, — if he wrote a care- 
 less hand, or if his Greek grammar was bad, or 
 if he spelled badly. In truth, Tertius knew how
 
 I()8 HOW TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 to write as well as Paul knew how to make 
 tents. He wrote well, — well enough to make 
 the first draft of the letter to the Romans. 
 And his name is presented to every man who 
 has his Bible, — as the name of a faithful fellow, 
 who has served mankind, — for century after 
 century, through all time, because he knew 
 how to do one thing well, and because he was 
 willing to consecrate that talent to the common 
 weal. 
 
 Now keep that example in mind all along. 
 Then you can carry into the notion of common 
 work, — the work of the Common Weal ; or, as 
 Paul would say, of the Kingdom of God, — this 
 first necessity that it is clean work, work well 
 done. It is not slop-work. It is good journey- 
 work, as our fathers used to say. Take for a 
 second thought the eternal truth which Paul 
 falls back to so eagerly, — that, if one member 
 be alive and strong, the whole body will have 
 a better chance to be alive and strong. Once 
 and again he falls back upon that fable which 
 the Roman senator addressed to the Roman 
 people, — the body cannot be well unless each 
 hand and eye and foot is well. Life in the 
 parts, — quick, tingling life, — so that there 
 may be life in the whole, — vigorous, strong, 
 eternal. 
 
 How many men I have known, — how many
 
 THE CHURCH. 1 69 
 
 men you have known, — who had even gained 
 for themselves a sort of pubhc reputation for 
 this care of the business of tlie community, who 
 have so utterly neglected Paul's personal direc- 
 tions that they cannot take any care of their 
 own. Such a man, by some political turn, is 
 appointed a consul abroad, or a secretary of 
 legation. He studies international affairs, he 
 devotes himself to the public business in these 
 lines. By and by, there is a political overturn 
 at home, and the government will not renew 
 his commission. He has to come home. He 
 is apt to complain that he is left out in the 
 cold. Then you begin to ask what he is fit for ; 
 " What did he do when he was at home .'' " 
 That was the question which the Connecticut 
 farmer asked the French marshal, Rochambeau. 
 And you find that at home he did nothing but 
 manage primary meetings and attend county 
 conventions, and, in other fashions, take care of 
 elections. He had no trade or calling in which 
 he was a master. I suppose this to be what 
 Paul would have called failing to bear his own 
 burden. What follows ? Why, when the coun- 
 try, wisely or unwisely, turns him out from its 
 service, there is, alas ! no place left where he is 
 to fall. 
 
 But I do not mean to speak slightly of what 
 this man has done in attending primary meet-
 
 170 HOW THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 ings, in going to county conventions, and in 
 preparing for elections. I hope no man hears 
 me who does not go to primary meetings and 
 who is not willing to take his share of duty in 
 county conventions, and who does not diligently 
 and with prayer prepare for every election of 
 the town or of the state. I do say, that no man 
 can rightly attend, even to such little public 
 duties as that, and that no man can have the 
 power in such service that a man should seek, 
 who has not shown that he can wisely and well 
 mind his own business, keep his own accounts, 
 pay his own debts, stay out of debt, and earn 
 an honorable reputation as a manly workman. 
 
 Such a man as that has flung away his life in 
 trying to care for the state, while he cannot 
 show that there is one part of its separate duties 
 that he can do well. He cannot bear his own 
 burdens, because he has all his life thought he 
 was bearing other people's. Alas ! the other 
 people do not agree with him ! They think he 
 never bore theirs. And this I say only by 
 illustration. I have to speak of what affects us 
 here more directly. I have to speak of the 
 welfare of the Church of Christ, as an organ- 
 ized institution. And I am not speaking of this 
 particular church of yours, or, may I say, yours 
 and ours } For I do not know you personally 
 as well as I wish I did, and so I have no knowl-
 
 THE CHURCH. I/I 
 
 edge from which I can speak personally of your 
 affairs. But, in many churches, — and a pity 
 it is to have to say so, — there are brethren, 
 yes, and there are sisters, who are prominent in 
 the business of the Church as a church, who 
 cannot take care of their own business. It 
 seems as if they took the time for the affairs of 
 the organization which they would have better 
 spent on their own affairs. Or, looking the other 
 way, it seems as if, because they found nothing 
 to do in their own business, they thought they 
 would undertake the Master's business rather 
 than do nothing. Now he wants no such re- 
 cruits. He wants whole men and whole women. 
 He wants those who can do a good day's work, 
 and do it well. He wants those who have been 
 faithful in few things, — and it is those, and 
 those only whom he promotes to the charge 
 of many things. It is the faithful, industrious, 
 yes, and successful saint, who has used the 
 talent which was given him, who has rightly 
 and well handled the pound intrusted to him, 
 to whom there comes, to surprise his modesty, 
 that noblest welcome ever spoken, " Enter thou 
 into the joy of thy Lord." And no man can 
 pretend to tell what is the injury which has 
 been inflicted on the Church by the profane 
 interference in the work it has to do, of those 
 whom men saw incapable of doing their own
 
 172 HOW THEY LIVED IX HAMPTON. 
 
 work. Their words are vain ; their appeals are 
 vain ; their counsels are vain ; — because men 
 judge them by their fruits. They have not 
 borne their own burdens well, and so it is that, 
 in this most important affair of all, it is certain 
 that they cannot bear their brothers'. 
 
 Now, by the side of that failure, — of the man 
 whom I described just now, the man who put 
 his trust in princes, and found princes failed him, 
 — I will tell you the story of another failure. 
 It is the man who stitches and hammers at 
 shoes on his bench, — ten, twelve hours a day, 
 perhaps, — or who stands behind his counter 
 from early morning to late evening, or who 
 drudges in the same self-imposed slavery at the 
 forge or the grindstone, and does nothing else, 
 does nothing larger. He does not bear his 
 brother's burdens. He does not care for the com- 
 mon weal. He will let his children go to the pub- 
 lic school. But he will not serve on the district 
 committee. He will let his wife take a book 
 from the public library. But he will not be a 
 trustee or a director. He is willing to walk on 
 the sidewalk and drive on the road. But he will 
 not be a county commissioner, or a selectman, 
 or a roadmaster. He is willing to have the gov- 
 ernment bring him his letters and his newspa- 
 pers, and to pay for that service not half what it 
 costs. But he is not willing to go to an election.
 
 THE CHURCH. I73 
 
 or to compel the right choice so far as his power 
 goes. "He does not care for poHtics." ^sop 
 would have been glad to jDut such a man in a 
 fable. But even ^sop could not find a fox or a 
 hedgehog who was so mean. This is the man who 
 tells you, "I care for nobody, — no, not I !" — 
 and he deserves to have the other half of the song 
 come true, which says that "nobody cares for me." 
 
 Mr. Sherlock made a long pause after this 
 description of selfishness, and then, addressing 
 himself personally to the men in front of him, 
 he said : — 
 
 I say all this here, because I think you work- 
 men at Hampton have even more distinct du- 
 ties in these lines than the general run of work- 
 men in America. I declare to you, that I think 
 this system of manufacture which you have 
 started here, is going to stand or fall, to succeed 
 or to fail, — according to the answers which the 
 men in this church now, — the hundred and fifty 
 of you who are workers and voters and thinkers, 
 — make to these two demands of Paul. You 
 have started a system in which the workman is 
 the capitalist in part, and in which the workman 
 shares as he ought to share in the ups and 
 downs of every honorable adventure. There is 
 no act of Congress or of Parliament that any
 
 174 'low TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 man should grow rich. There is a promise of 
 the Eternal God that the community which lives 
 by His law, and seeks Him, shall find Him. 
 More than this, — He has said that the commu- 
 nity which seeks Him and finds His Kingdom, 
 shall have these little things, such as meat and 
 drink and clothing ; they shall be added, He has 
 said, to His other infinite compensations. But 
 this community must live by His law. It must 
 obey Him. It must be part of His Kingdom. 
 He must be King. No man in it shall live for 
 himself. They must live for the common good. 
 Every man in it must bear his own burden. 
 But every man also must bear his brother's. I 
 say, that on your success here will it depend 
 whether other mill-owners will try the same ven- 
 ture, whether other workmen will have the same 
 opportunity. I say you will succeed if the very 
 men who hear me are willing to count them- 
 selves, not as lonely men, but as brothers in the 
 great brotherhood, — as fellow-soldiers in Christ's 
 army. I do not know if you thought of this 
 when you began. I think perhaps you builded 
 better than you knew. But this I know, — and 
 you will learn, — that your enterprise will suc- 
 ceed as fast and as far as every workman in it 
 works as a fellow-workman with God, and so is 
 willing and ready to do his share of the building 
 of God's Kingcdom in the world.
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. 
 
 I HAD seen in the co-operative store tliat 
 they had made all the arrangements for a 
 reading-room, and that they had a very small 
 collection of books of reference which they used 
 there. They said that they had had a more 
 extensive collection of books, but that when the 
 library was founded their books went in with 
 the others into that collection. This led me to 
 inquire about the library the next morning from 
 my friend, and he sent one of his children with 
 me that afternoon to see it, and to talk with 
 the librarian. The library was in a separate 
 house, which they told me had been a dye-house 
 in the old mill ; but which had been taken jdos- 
 session of for this purpose, when the new 
 dye-house was built under the direction of the 
 present company. I found that the pecuniary 
 arrangement of the library was precisely the 
 same as that made for the church. This old 
 dye-house had been valued. The house was 
 worth, at the time they took possession of it,
 
 1/6 now TllEV LIVED IN HAMPTON, 
 
 $475, and they paid a rent of four per cent to the 
 proprietors of the mill for the use of it. Indeed, 
 I found on talking to one or two of the men and 
 several of the women, that they all understood 
 that it was better on every account that they 
 should maintain the library, themselves, and that 
 it should not be counted as an eleemosynary in- 
 stitution or an institution which other people 
 founded for them. I had no doubt, from my ex- 
 perience with some other institutions elsewhere, 
 that it was much more than worth the trifle which 
 they paid for rent, to be able to diffuse the feel- 
 ing among all the young people, and what I may 
 call the outsiders, that they bought these books 
 themselves for themselves, and that nobody was 
 trying to stuff down their throats a particular 
 literature selected by some higher power. In- 
 deed, the first step in the institution of the 
 library, large or small, is apt to be a false one, 
 and its falseness is in this direction — of con- 
 descension. The founder of the library has 
 given ten thousand dollars, and he thinks, and 
 probably thinks correctly, that he knows better 
 than the people who are to read it what they 
 had better read. He is right in thinking that 
 he knows better than they do. But he is wrong 
 in thinking that he can make them read books 
 which they do not want to read. 
 
 Now, exactly as in the co-operative store, the
 
 THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. I77 
 
 store began to succeed when they gave the pur- 
 chasers an equal share in the profit, so in the 
 library, the library begins to succeed when the 
 readers begin to understand that it is, in good 
 faith, their library, and not the library that some- 
 body else has made for them. You may use any 
 amount of moral suasion you choose in persuad- 
 ing them to read good books instead of bad 
 books. In the long run they will find that a 
 good book is better than a bad one, as indeed 
 its name would seem to imply. But you are 
 not going to make them read books because 
 certain other people of an education different 
 from their own had read them and say they 
 ought to be read. 
 
 The most striking instance I ever knew of the 
 infelicity of letting one set of people buy books 
 for another, is in the story told of a state gov- 
 ernment, in old times, which used to send to 
 the same publisher annually, for so many thou- 
 sand dollars' worth of books for the state library. 
 Poor human nature is so weak that they say he 
 could not resist the temptation of clearing off, 
 every year, so much of his stock which the rest 
 of the purchasing world had not chosen to buy. 
 Now those books which he sent were undoubt- 
 edly good books, well printed, and well bound. 
 But, after all, the use of a book is to be read. 
 Indeed, the sooner it is read to pieces, the bet-
 
 1/8 HOW TllEV LIVED IX HAMPTON. 
 
 ter. For you can certainly get another copy, 
 and you know then that it has fulfilled its mis- 
 sion. The danger and the vice of librarians is, 
 that they are apt to think that it is important 
 that their books should be kept on the shelves. 
 Now, on the other hand, they should regard 
 themselves as doing a duty exactly like that of 
 the directors or cashiers of banks, whose busi- 
 ness it is to keep the money of the stockholders 
 in active circulation, to know where it is, and to 
 be able to recall it at the proper times, and by 
 no means to lock up all their capital stock in 
 their vaults, of no use to any one. 
 
 The public library at Hampton was not 
 above receiving gifts, however, after it was 
 organized. In point of fact, Mr. Nourse made 
 it some very handsome gifts. As Mr. Spinner 
 had told me, he was a great traveller, and he had 
 formed a habit, when he was in any distant city, 
 of sending to them such books as would illus- 
 trate the history or customs of the country in 
 which he was, if he could find them in English. 
 And he passed his rule sometimes when he could 
 send good illustrated books, though they were in 
 other languages. Still, as Miss Jane Stevens 
 had said of her little library, — the principal sup- 
 port of the library was from the people them- 
 selves. The committee which directed it was a 
 sub-committee of the government of the store,
 
 THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. 1/9 
 
 and with every return at the annual meeting of 
 the stockholders, and other persons interested 
 in the stock, they voted a larger and larger sum 
 towards library expenses. They engaged a young 
 woman to keep the library open every evening 
 at first, and eventually it was kept open all the 
 time in winter when the mills were not running. 
 This made a very long evening. 
 
 I have had a good deal to do with such things 
 in different places, and I looked with a good deal 
 of interest through the shelves, and afterwards 
 over the printed catalogue, to see what class of 
 books they had chosen to buy. I was not sur- 
 prised to find a very large proportion of children's 
 books. Then there was a quite considerable 
 branch of books of natural history, and I found, 
 on inquiring, that the interest in these studies was 
 due to Miss Jane Stevens herself. She had a boy 
 come in one night to her schoolroom, who wanted 
 a book, and she had the good sense to show one 
 of Mr. Nourse's elegant books of illustration, 
 which was, as it happened, a series of butterflies 
 and other insects which had been collected in 
 South America. She told the boy that he and 
 his companion might look at the book there, if 
 they would be careful. But then she asked if 
 they would not like to know something about 
 butterflies, and perhaps to collect butterflies, 
 and put into their hands a little English book
 
 l80 now THKY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 not above them, which had some curious studies 
 on the habits of caterpillars, moths, and butter- 
 flies. The next Saturday afternoon they started 
 out, four or five of them, with a butterfly net, 
 and the result was quite a little collection. She 
 taught some of the girls how to make cages in 
 which caterpillars could spin their cocoons. She 
 taught some of them how to make for them- 
 selves little books in which, as well as they 
 could, they drew pictures of the growth of the 
 grub from the egg, representing him every three 
 days, in fact, till he advanced to his full size. 
 Boys and girls took up the new study with a 
 great deal of enthusiasm, and the result was 
 that there was a great demand for all the " but- 
 terfly books," as they called them, which Miss 
 Stevens had in store ; and the committee, of 
 course, were glad, as far as their means went, 
 to let her buy more. As soon as Mr. Nourse 
 heard this, he was well pleased. One of the 
 girls had made a particularly pretty book of 
 studies, and had gone so far as to color her 
 caterpillars neatly. This was sent to Mr. 
 Nourse as a Christmas present. He was very 
 much pleased, and, from that time, kept his eye 
 on the catalogues and advertisements, and sup- 
 plied the little collection with popular books ; 
 and, indeed, with some books of a scientific value 
 which would help the children in these lines.
 
 THE PUBLIC LIBRARY. l8l 
 
 Miss Stevens told me of this story with a good 
 deal of interest, as, indeed, she might ; and from 
 his own point of view. Spinner afterwards told 
 me the same story, to show that a study which 
 could never have been forced upon the com- 
 munity as this, introduced itself, as he said, if 
 you were only willing to begin at the right end. 
 
 I found that she was in correspondence with 
 the Hartford people, the Providence people, with 
 Mr. Bowker in New York, and that she kept the 
 run of what she wanted, in the way of publica- 
 tion and library work, as well as the grandest of 
 them do. In short, she assured me, and so did 
 Mr. Spinner, that the library was now a very pop- 
 ular institution in the place, and that there was 
 no danger whatever that the interest in it would 
 fall away. They lent very freely, but they en- 
 forced their rules regularly ; and they were glad 
 to extend their accommodations for reading in 
 the building itself, so as to encourage all the 
 young people to form habits of reading where, 
 of course, they could readily consult books of 
 reference. 
 
 Mr. Raikes, superintendent of the Sunday- 
 school, told me that the Sunday-school was a 
 different place and a different thing, now that 
 he and the other teachers could refer the older 
 scholars to such books as they ought to consult, 
 and that he was quite sure that when an intclli-
 
 l82 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 gent teacher made such a suggestion, the sug- 
 gestion would be followed up by application to 
 Miss Stevens, or the librarian, for the books 
 referred to. She told me that she made it a 
 matter of course to have on hand all the books 
 required for reference by the Chautauquan Read- 
 ing Circle, and that they had, every year, a large 
 " home circle " of those readers, who would have 
 given her no peace if she had not kept the 
 library up to the intelligent requisitions which 
 the Chautauquan system of reading demands. 
 
 All this, however, it must be observed, was 
 absolutely democratic. The readers themselves 
 made the selection of books. They thought they 
 knew what they wanted, and if they made a mis- 
 take the fault was their own.
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 ENTERTAINMENT. 
 
 HAMPTON made up the whole, or^nearly 
 the whole, as has been said, of District 
 No. 13, in the township in which it belonged, 
 so that the management of its school fell almost 
 entirely under the oversight of a district com- 
 mittee, chosen by the people themselves in 
 their annual town meeting. Such is the law of 
 that state. A year or two before I was there, 
 some showman had come up the valley with an 
 exhibition, which had called together, as most 
 shows or concerts did, a considerable audience, 
 and which had displeased the leaders of the 
 community. I should not think they had been 
 prudish or over-sensitive about it, from what I 
 heard. But Holmes, for instance, said to me, 
 very quietly, " It was not such a performance 
 as I chose to take my wife and children to see." 
 Now a good deal of money goes into the 
 pockets of the itinerant showmen, of various 
 departments, in a village as prosperous as this. 
 And if I class the purveyors of concerts, and 
 the gentlemen and ladies who deliver lectures
 
 184 HOW THEY LIVED IN IIAMl'TON. 
 
 among the showmen, they must not be sur- 
 prised. For certainly the announcements, or 
 the advertisements, sometimes make it hard to 
 distinguish between the entertainments pro- 
 posed. 
 
 When there was any talk, serious or light, as 
 to the advantages or disadvantages of Hampton 
 as a place to live in, it was very apt to come 
 round to the discussion of the amusements 
 which came there, or which stayed away. In- 
 deed, the great problem of this day, and of the 
 next generation, is how the congestion of the 
 large cities is to be checked, and how the popu- 
 lation of the country can be increased. Who- 
 ever is interested in this question, and means 
 to do anything for its solution, had best con- 
 sider, first of all, the questions of public amuse- 
 ment or entertainment. For there is no use in 
 proving to young people that they can earn 
 more wages in a healthy country village than 
 in a crowded unhealthy city, if they think the 
 city cheerful and gay or the country dull and 
 stupid. They do not crowd the cities because 
 they think they shall grow rich there, but 
 because they want an animated and crowded 
 life. Wisely or unwisely, they are tempted by 
 the excitement of crowds, of concerts, of bands, 
 of theatres, of public meetings, of processions, of 
 exhibitions, of parties, of clubs, or, in general.
 
 ENTERTAINMENT. 1 85 
 
 of society. Whoever will take the trouble to 
 listen to the conversation of such young people, 
 will see, in five minutes, that the recollection of 
 such excitements, or the hope of partaking of 
 them, is the inducement which leads them to seek 
 city life, or which, after they have sought it, leads 
 them to remain in it, in spite of its manifold hard- 
 ships. Mrs. Helen Campbell has painted a terri- 
 ble picture, not exaggerated, not overcolored in 
 a single stroke, which portrays the horrible 
 sufferings of the handiworkers of her own sex 
 in the city of New York, But whoever asks 
 why those poor women remain there, in their 
 ill-requited toil, and why they do not go to live 
 in that country which God made, with its better 
 wages and its lighter work, learns at once that 
 the sufficient reason is that they want to stay, 
 and do not want to go. More than this, if any 
 Aladdin should lift fifty thousand of the poorest 
 of them from their wretched tenements to- 
 night, and make of them princesses and duch- 
 esses, their hard places in their workshops 
 would be filled before the week was over by 
 fifty thousand other girls who would gladly 
 come from the hillsides and valleys, which we 
 rightly say are better homes for them. 
 
 Whoever considers the problem thus pre- 
 sented, and wants to relieve what we have 
 called the congestion of life in the large cities,
 
 l86 now THKV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 must do what he can to increase the opportuni- 
 ties for entertainment, for amusement, yes, for 
 excitement, so far as it can reasonably be done, 
 for those who live in the country. It is a mis- 
 fortune indeed, that, from the nature of the 
 case, literature is misleading. Books are gener- 
 ally printed in cities, and naturally authors 
 gather there. The leading newspapers and 
 magazines are, almost of necessity, published 
 in such cities. So far as they direct the opinion 
 of the young, there is an undercurrent or ground- 
 note, which suggests to the young reader that 
 in cities is to be found the governing influence 
 of the world. The suggestion is probably false, 
 but it is none the less seductive to inexperienced 
 readers. Thus Mr. Horace Greeley may say, 
 " Go West, young man," but the young man ob- 
 serves that Mr. Greeley himself remains in New 
 York, and naturally enough, if he respects him, 
 follows his example rather than his instructions. 
 The leading people in the village of Hampton 
 knew perfectly well how strong was the under- 
 tow of the tide which would carry away their 
 young people to larger manufacturing towns, 
 or to great commercial cities, if its constant 
 sweep was not steadily counteracted. It was 
 after the almost disgraceful public entertain- 
 ment which has been alluded to, that they took 
 distinct measures, quite systematically, to super-
 
 ENTERTAINMENT. 1 8/ 
 
 intend the public entertainment by system ; 
 and the people most interested in this meant 
 positive work, and not negative. "We want 
 to overcome evil with good," said Dick Sheri- 
 dan, a queer Irishman they had among them, 
 who, as it happened, took the oversight of this 
 business. A district school meeting in No. 9 
 was not generally an affair which greatly inter- 
 ested the younger voters, or the people gener- 
 ally. But on the occasion alluded to, it had 
 been generally reported in the shops and the 
 different rooms, that Uncle Dick, as Sheridan 
 was called, meant to make a speech. Such a 
 thing was quite unheard of, and the meeting was 
 crowded with voters and with spectators also, 
 who had come to hear the man who, though he 
 was the wit or wag of the village, was not 
 generally interested in public affairs. 
 
 When the meeting was well under way, Sher- 
 idan rose, perfectly serious ; and an excellent 
 speech he made. He knew that the boys had 
 come with the idea that he would make fun for 
 them, and he took care that the boys should be 
 disappointed. He spoke, with a good deal of 
 feeling, of the impression which the coarse and 
 vulgar entertainment had made in the village. 
 He said he did not think any one in the village 
 was to blame for it, but, for one, he did not mean 
 to have the young people so insulted again if he
 
 l88 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 could help it. lie said also that any one who 
 knew him knew that he had no wish to check 
 legitimate fun or sport of any kind. He had 
 not come to this meeting with any such idea. 
 It was here that he used the quotation from St. 
 Paul that has been cited, and said that if they 
 meant to abate such nuisances they must over- 
 come evil with good. 
 
 "That w^e may have," said he, "such advan- 
 tage as legal authority may give us in this mat- 
 ter, I propose that the district committee, now 
 to be elected, be requested to take the super- 
 vision of the public entertainments of this place 
 as a part of the public education. I know very 
 well how much and how little this vote may 
 mean under the law of this state. But I know, 
 also, that it will mean a great deal in this com- 
 munity if it is passed, as I believe it will be, 
 unanimously. 
 
 " My idea is, that instead of a district school- 
 committee of three, such as we usually choose, 
 we shall this year make a committee of ten. I 
 propose that we re-elect the last year's committee 
 of three, and add to it three gentlemen and four 
 ladies. I propose that, besides the supervision 
 of our school, they communicate with the select- 
 men of this town as to the persons who receive 
 licenses for public entertainment. If they ap- 
 prove, on the whole, of such persons, all right.
 
 ENTERTAINMENT. 1 89 
 
 If they find another such case as that of these 
 minstrels we had here last month, why, they will 
 say so to the people who have halls to let here, 
 and I do not think that, when" they have said so, 
 anybody in this town will let such a man a hall." 
 Here there was some applause. But Dick Sheri- 
 dan went steadily on. " But I do not mean to 
 stop here." He meant that this committee, — 
 and when he said committee he really meant 
 himself, — should take boldly and bodily the 
 positive direction and provision for the amuse- 
 ments of the place. He had thought of this 
 before a good deal, and was not sorry to under- 
 take to carry out some of his own plans. He 
 was quite clear that, with a little money in hand, 
 so that fit contracts could be made with the 
 right persons, he could induce performers or 
 artists of high character to come to Hampton 
 for the entertainment of the people. He did 
 not even dare to show his own committee at 
 first his plans in detail, so bold were they. But 
 he was one of those men who has his eyes open 
 to such things ; he was constitutionally fond 
 of public entertainment himself, and had never 
 succeeded very well in enjoying himself when 
 he was all alone for four or five hours in an 
 evening, even if you gave him the most enter- 
 taining books for company. He was a social 
 fellow, who liked to be in a crowd, and he knew,
 
 IQO HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 almost by instinct, those people who, by genius 
 or education, were able to call such persons to- 
 gether. He said there were good actors who 
 would give recitals and presentations, that there 
 were good artists who would draw amusing or 
 instructive pictures at sight for audiences, that 
 there were musicians, vocal or instrumental, who 
 were only waiting to be employed, and that the 
 person who could control these people was 
 a permanent and official manager with a little 
 money in his hand. He said that this class of 
 people were, of their very nature, singularly 
 poor business men ; he said that if a business 
 man met with them, he had them, so to speak, 
 at an advantage. Now Sheridan did not want to 
 cheat them ; he did want to pay them fair wages 
 for fair work ; and he wanted to entertain the peo- 
 ple of Hampton at the same time. All this he 
 had thought out himself. All this he knew he 
 could persuade his committee to try, or he thought 
 he knew it. And he made this speech with a view 
 to having that sort of authority given to him that 
 he could go forward with courage, and that nobody 
 could say that Dick Sheridan was putting himself 
 into an affair with which he had nothing to do. 
 So soon as Sheridan had spoken, my friend 
 Holmes, he of the cabbage and strawberries, 
 spoke, and to the same purpose, though in cjuite 
 a different way. I fancy that they had not had
 
 ENTERTAINMENT. I9I 
 
 much to do with each other before, and that it 
 was rather a surprise, perhaps an amusement to 
 the youngsters present, to see them advocating 
 the same cause at the same meeting. Holmes 
 was recognized as a religious man. He had a 
 Bible class on Sunday, and was, I believe, 
 thought strict in the charge of his children. 
 Nobody ever called Dick Sheridan strict, and, 
 though he was a very decent member of the 
 community, as far as his daily manners and 
 customs went, nobody would have classed him 
 among distinctly religious men. If he was dis- 
 tinguished for anything, it was for a tradition 
 that he had once been a pitcher in a celebrated 
 ball-club, and that he always interested himself 
 in the sports of such clubs in Hampton and in 
 Wentworth. 
 
 The motion, however, was no surprise to the 
 leader of the meeting, or to the fathers of fam- 
 ilies who were interested in the schools. It had 
 been carefully arranged beforehand, in the homa 
 talk which makes the genuine " preliminary 
 meeting" in New England politics, and, with 
 little other discussion than has been described, 
 it was passed unanimously. The three dis- 
 trict committeemen of the last year were 
 chosen again. To them were added three men 
 and four women, as Sheridan had proposed. 
 He was one of the men, Holmes was another,
 
 192 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 and young Brahm, who was the first bass on 
 the glee-ckib and president of the ball-club, was 
 the third ; Miss Jane Stevens, who has been 
 already spoken of, was one of the women. 
 
 So soon as the committee was organized, it 
 was clear that Dick Sheridan "meant work." 
 He was in correspondence with this band and 
 that quartette. He was away in New York for 
 two or three days, and there were even rumors 
 that he had a personal interview with Mr. 
 Beecher, to persuade him to come to Hamp- 
 ton to lecture. What he did, and what he was 
 said to do, kept the talkers of Hampton busy 
 for the next six weeks, and the newspapers in 
 Wentworth and Alton even took up the story 
 of the achievements of this committee. What 
 followed was, as he himself explained to me, 
 that never was there a course of entertainments 
 so well advertised as this first course of con- 
 certs, lectures, and readings. "From that time, 
 Mr. Freeman," he said to me, "we were made. 
 We made on that one course, — oh, more than 
 two hundred dollars clear profit, — just because 
 it was a new thing, and everybody was talking 
 about us. There is plenty of money spent on 
 these things always. The trouble is, that very 
 little of it, in comparison, goes to modest peo- 
 ple, who will not blow, and a great deal of it
 
 ENTERTAINMENT, I93 
 
 goes to liars and tramps, who skin the business, 
 and never mean to come again. 
 
 " We had over two hundred dollars in hand. 
 We appointed a permanent trustee and treas- 
 urer to keep it for us and to keep the accounts. 
 Then, you see, when I went to engage an orches- 
 tra, or a quartette, or anybody, I could talk busi- 
 ness. I did not have to say that if the night 
 were good they would have so much, and if it 
 were bad we could only pay the expenses. I 
 said 'twenty dollars,' or 'thirty dollars,' or 'fifty 
 dollars,' or whatever, and they knew I meant it. 
 We controlled the hall. All we had to pay for 
 that, — well, you know about that, — was light 
 and heat, and our per cent to Mr. Nourse on 
 his plant. And then, — well, these people are 
 not fools ; they know a good thing from a bad 
 one ; and all that was needed was, that we 
 should be able to make to them fair proposals, 
 to pay them money in advance, if the poor fel- 
 lows needed it, but, above all things, to pay 
 them on the nail, as soon as they had given 
 their entertainment." 
 
 Sheridan added, modestly enough, that there 
 was a good deal in approaching these people in 
 the right way. He said: "I might have stroked 
 all the fur back, and had them all dislike me. 
 As it stands, do you know, I think they like 
 me better than almost any person they have to
 
 194 "OW TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 deal with. I have never cheated them, a.s some 
 'impressarios' would have done, by making very 
 large promises, which they could never fulfil. I 
 have never degraded them by speaking as if I 
 were hiring them for some menial service. I 
 have always seen that, when they came here, 
 they should be treated as well as a clergyman 
 would be if he came here. I have always made 
 them understand that I considered them as 
 co-operating with the best people of this place, 
 for the highest interests of this place. I have 
 made it my business to see that they were cour- 
 teously and cordially treated by our best citi- 
 zens when they were here, and I tried to make 
 Hampton so agreeable to them that they would 
 want to come again. The consequence is that 
 they like to come ; they will put themselves out 
 of the way to come here for me, even though I 
 pay them much less than they are paid in some 
 other places. You can not, Mr. Freeman," he 
 said, in conclusion, " overestimate the advan- 
 tage of dealing with authority in a permanent 
 position, so that you can look forward and re- 
 member the past as well, and, above all things, 
 the advantage of having some money in the 
 pocket." 
 
 I said, with some admiration of the man, that 
 they also had the great advantage of a stage 
 manager who did not want to be paid. Sheridan
 
 ENTERTAINMENT. I95 
 
 laughed, and took the compliment good-na- 
 turedly. 
 
 "I like to see the thing well done. I had 
 talked about such a thing for years, and I meant 
 to make it succeed, now I had a chance. But 
 the others backed me up well. That little Miss 
 Stevens, now, — there's a great deal more of 
 her than you think for. And then, the people 
 themselves, they meant to have it succeed. I 
 tell you, it was Democracy applied to Entertain- 
 ment, just as the whole business here is Demo- 
 cracy applied to spinning and weaving. The 
 secret of Democracy in anything, Mr. Freeman, 
 is not any magic written down on a sheet of 
 paper, and called a constitution. It is that 
 everybody wants the machine to move, and so 
 makes it move, and does his share. That is 
 just what those people saw. They paid their 
 money freely, because they knew it was their 
 concern. They did not care for profit so much 
 as they cared for success. 
 
 *' Well ! I started from the first for variety. 
 And I never pretended to be instructive. I 
 told Miss Jane Stevens to keep her instruction 
 at school, — that she was to be made to laugh 
 herself, — that we were to entertain them. She's 
 no fool, and she laughed and said that was all 
 right, — and she has been a real help, as I tell 
 you. Variety, I said, and all entertainment,
 
 196 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMILTON. 
 
 and do not be too grand. For the autumn and 
 winter, we tried first for two entertainments a 
 week, and afterwards for three. But we also 
 tried not to interfere. If they wanted, at the 
 church, to have a lecture or meeting or anything, 
 they let us know in advance, and we kept out 
 of their way. 'Courses.'' Oh, yes, — we have 
 some courses. A good course is a good thing. 
 It is a mutual insurance, — a good night takes 
 care of a bad one, and a bright speaker draws, 
 if you have made a mistake, and engaged a dull 
 one for another evening. But we were not 
 limited to courses. We kept our eyes open, and 
 our ears. If a man, or a troupe, or a band, were 
 coming to Wentworth or to Norwich, we let 
 them understand that there was sure pay, if 
 not quite so much, if they would come round 
 to us. We would have them Monday, — that 
 was all the same to us. But perhaps you do 
 not know that Monday is a bad day for show- 
 men generally." 
 
 In this way, partly because Mr. Sheridan and 
 his committee had the eclat of a new beginning, 
 the first season was very profitable, and the 
 trustee-treasurer had quite a sum in hand at 
 the end of the first winter. Then it was that, 
 to the surprise of every one, he announced a 
 change of base, and carried it in his committee. 
 He proposed that three-fourths of this money
 
 ENTERTAINMENT. I97 
 
 should be spent for the open-air entertainments 
 of the summer. So much help was to be given 
 to the ball-club and the tennis-club. So much 
 was to be spent for evening concerts in the 
 square. And, as the money was everybody's 
 money, it was agreed that a part of it should be 
 used to negotiate with the railroad companies, 
 to provide for two all-day excursions, by which 
 those who started early and returned late might 
 have a long day at Sachem's Head, on the Sound. 
 
 "In the end," Sheridan said, "the excursions 
 have not cost us one cent. I mean the people 
 have bought tickets enough to pay for the whole 
 thing. But it is with the railroad as it is with 
 the orchestras. They want a sure thing. They 
 are glad enough to sell me a train, and to sell it 
 to me low, if I have the money. But if it comes 
 to 'if and 'perhaps,' — if they are to take the 
 risk, — why, they want the possible profit, as 
 well as the possible loss. So I never have of- 
 fered them any doubtful enterprise. I have 
 said, ' I will take four cars, or six,' as the case 
 may be. And you can see that, after one suc- 
 cess, we are wellnigh sure. If we were not 
 sure, why, we have something in the bank to 
 fall back upon. 
 
 " Now," he said, " I am really well known 
 among the large fraternity of people who amuse 
 and entertain the rest of the world. The right
 
 198 HOW TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 sort know mc. They address me ; I do not 
 have to hunt them up. They know the terms 
 are cash down, but they also know that we shall 
 stand no nonsense. In these last years we have 
 had the hall open nearly sixty times in three 
 months, from November first to February, and 
 in the other months almost as often. And we 
 have had some of the best talent in the country 
 here. Two secrets, Mr. Freeman, — cash on 
 the nail and constant variety. But we could 
 never have had the cash had it not been Democ- 
 racy applied to Entertainment." 
 
 This matter of public amusement or enter- 
 tainment played so important a part in the 
 social life of this little community that we fre- 
 quently came round to it in conversation. From 
 all my nearest friends there I heard a good deal 
 about the practical working of their plans., and 
 I satisfied myself that Sheridan had not over- 
 stated either their success or their importance. 
 
 In any such enterprise as this, the perma- 
 nency of the population is a matter to be very 
 carefully provided for. It is, indeed, quite essen- 
 tial that the greater part of the community shall 
 remain where they are, shall maintain the local 
 pride or esprit de corps of the place, and that 
 thus the works shall train their own workmen,
 
 ENTERTAINMENT. I99 
 
 as Spinner once and again said to me. In all 
 that I had learned about the store, I had seen 
 that its success absolutely depended on its free- 
 dom from any vagary of public opinion, which 
 should set any considerable number of those 
 who shared in it upon some emigration project, 
 for which they would want to withdraw, of a sud- 
 den, their capital. The danger of removal was 
 distinctly visible here, but, as Holmes said again 
 and again, it was just as great in every other 
 relation of their life, and their success was al- 
 ways just as much impaired by the " flitting " 
 of good hands, though the danger might not be 
 so apparent upon the surface. " New men do not 
 care anything about you." "New hands take 
 on airs." " New hands spoil the machinery." 
 "New hands, — new ways." Such saws were 
 repeated to me again and again. 
 
 " I do not say," said Spinner, "that I want to 
 build up a community of my namesakes here, 
 or of weavers. I don't take much stock in Mr. 
 Atkinson's theory of the heredity of good weav- 
 ing. However that may be, I want the boys 
 and girls to choose the calling that God made 
 them for, whatever that may be. But among 
 those callings open to them, is this of weaving 
 good woollen cloth. It is an honorable and 
 profitable way of serving the world, as honor- 
 able and profitable as any. I do mean that my
 
 200 now TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 boys and girls shall not be ashamed of their 
 father's business, and that if they use it, they 
 shall can')' it on to advantage. They may go on 
 a wander-tour if they want to, as lads like to do, 
 when their time comes. But I want to have 
 them come back here, and I want to have this 
 place as attractive as any place they will find." 
 
 Substantially the same thing was said by the 
 other leaders of the little community. And they 
 were young enough themselves, and remem- 
 bered enough of their own youth, to know what 
 would make a town attractive to young people, 
 and what were the features of its life to which 
 the memory of a wanderer would return. They 
 knew that its social attractions would count for 
 more than money wages, and for more than any 
 prospect, even, of rapid promotion. To have 
 " had a good time," as the happy old English of 
 Dryden's time put it, — this is a thing which 
 young people remember, and to the renewal of 
 it they look forward. 
 
 And I was well pleased one day to find that 
 Mr. Sherlock took the same view. He picked 
 me up, with my basket of fish, one day when he 
 was driving, and he talked to me very seriously 
 of all this. He told me that he had an excellent 
 set of young people in Hampton, and that he 
 ascribed that very much to the watchful care 
 which had been kept, from the beginning almost,
 
 ENTERTAINMENT. 201 
 
 over the public entertainments of the young. 
 " Lead us not into temptation " means a great 
 deal. And he declared that the temptations 
 opened to young life, in the carelessness which 
 too often neglects this matter in the cities and 
 towns of the country, seemed to him to be the 
 enemies of Christian life most frequent, most 
 subtle, and most to be dreaded. If he probed 
 to the bottom the history of the moral decline 
 and ruin of any young man or young woman, he 
 was most apt to find that in the good-natured 
 negligence in which parents had left boy or girl 
 to hear or to see this or that, which broke up 
 all early principles of purity, was to be found 
 the beginning of the difficulty. Sheridan was 
 right when he told the people to overcome evil 
 with good. There was nothing else to overcome 
 it with, and the field in which he was at work 
 was by no means insignificant.
 
 w 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 TEMPERANCE. 
 
 E were sitting in the counting-room one 
 day, when both Mr. Spinner and Mr. 
 Workman seemed to have finished their after- 
 noon work, and I asked them how they coped 
 with the great devil of all. 
 
 "You mean liquor." It was Workman who 
 replied. "Well, we try to overcome evil with 
 good. All the conditions are in our favor, and 
 we have had more success than I would have 
 dared to hope. 
 
 "In the first place, — well, I do not know as 
 you know I have the whole responsibility of the 
 help ; our friend Spinner does not interfere with 
 me there, — I will not have a drinking man or 
 woman on the premises." 
 
 " Plenty of them apply," said Spinner, groan- 
 ing. "Show Mr. Freeman that letter which 
 you had from Dr. Good — " 
 
 " No, I will not stop to show it to him. But 
 I will tell him. It was a letter begging me 
 to take a family here which was broken down 
 because the man could not keep from whiskey.
 
 TEMPERANCE. 203 
 
 Dr. Good had lectured here, he knew his friend 
 could have no whiskey here, and he wanted to 
 send him to us as to a hospital. 
 
 "I do not know what you will think, but I 
 would not take him, though I believe he under- 
 stood his business. I am not sure if I was right. 
 I wrote Dr. Good the best letter I could, but I 
 did not quite satisfy myself. 
 
 " But the ground I take is, that I must care 
 first for these children and young people on the 
 ground. I will not lead them into temptation, 
 and the difficulty is so tremendous that I will be 
 on the guard everywhere." 
 
 Workman spoke with so much feeling that I 
 have no doubt there was a skeleton somewhere 
 in his own house, reminding him of his duty in 
 this matter, as there is, indeed, in most houses. 
 
 "Literature is bad enough," he went on to 
 say. " The descriptions of drinking, as if it 
 were the crowning height of a man's life, the 
 talk of wine, as if it were the highest article of 
 manufacture, — and this in good books, which 
 the young people ought to read, — this makes a 
 sort of mysterious joy hang over the thing, which 
 the devil must delight in. The newspapers, as 
 you know, are quite unreliable about it. Read 
 between the lines, and see if the man who re- 
 ported Neal Dow did not write out his notes in a 
 bar-room. My boys and girls have to meet all
 
 204 ^'O^V TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 that, at the best. And I did not want to have a 
 man here who might be devising plans to bring 
 liquor in, or even going down to Wentworth with 
 one of the young men to see what they could 
 find there. 
 
 " I run this mill as a place for the working- 
 men and women first. After we have done this," 
 he said, laughing, " if we can turn out a few yards 
 of Hampton A No. i, why, I do so, because 
 Spinner there is so eager about it. But, on the 
 whole, that is of little consequence in compari- 
 son. And, Mr. Freeman, when you can get 
 Congress to understand that the principal busi- 
 ness they have in hand, or any honest man, is 
 that same affair, — namely, that the people of 
 this country shall be decent men and women, 
 living in happy homes, — you will have made a 
 great step. Your tariff legislation, all your 
 revenue legislation, all your legislation on post- 
 office and telegraph, for a little instance, ought 
 to turn on that, and that only. 
 
 "Well, to come back to your question. I 
 think all the conditions are in our favor, as I 
 said. It was a great thing that, for years, each 
 man and woman had to scrimp and save one- 
 quarter of his wages really, — that is to say, was 
 compelled to save it, and to deposit it, instead 
 of having it to spend. That put us on a very 
 economical style of living at first, and whiskey
 
 TEMPERANCE. 205 
 
 must go, even tobacco largely, because we had 
 so little money, any of us. 
 
 " In the second place, almost all the leaders — 
 I mean the men with families, who would be apt 
 to stick fast and make up public sentiment — 
 were dready total abstainers. This happened 
 from the law of selection. For nobody could 
 well join us to go to work on three-quarter 
 wages, unless he had something laid up in the 
 bank. And a drinking man is not apt to have a 
 large bank account. 
 
 " Then, so soon as we got on the eight-hour 
 time schedule, nobody had the plea, which is a 
 perfectly just plea, of exhaustion. No man had 
 a * pocket-pistol,' or wanted to step round to a 
 saloon because he was dead beat out by being on 
 his feet all day, or by whatever else he had had 
 to do. Family men went home ; the boys, by 
 which I mean all the younger hands, went round 
 to their clubs, or to the reading-room, or to the 
 gymnasium, after Sheridan started it, or to play 
 ball, or croquet, or tennis. The open air is 
 always a good stimulus. What did that old 
 Quaker say to you. Spinner .-' " 
 
 " He said, ' Tell them to plant trees. Interest 
 them in planting trees. They will become so 
 excited and fascinated as they watch the trees 
 that they will have no disposition to drink.' 
 Dear old soul ! He judged everybody by himself."
 
 206 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 "Yes," said Workman, "but there was an 
 element of truth in the remark, as old Dr. Con- 
 verse used to say. Keep a young fellow in high 
 exercise, in good health, and in open air, and the 
 temptation of liquor is reduced to a minimum. 
 After three or four generations of such life there 
 will be little or none." 
 
 " We encourage, in every way, — I think Miss 
 Jane Stevens and Mr. Ledger have shown you 
 that, — all associations of the young people which 
 will give the stimulus of society in place of the 
 stimulus of liquor. The mistake about such 
 things is, that your Useful Knowledge kind of 
 people think that everybody wants to be learn- 
 ing something all the time. That is all non- 
 sense. The appetite for learning can be satis- 
 fied, just as the appetite for roast beef can be 
 satisfied, — and when it is satisfied, it is non- 
 sense to try to revive it till the time comes. 
 Here is where Dick Sheridan helps us, — more, 
 perhaps, than he thought when he began. He 
 was not satisfied that the boys should play 
 cricket and base-ball, without giving their moth- 
 ers and sisters and sweethearts comfortable 
 shady seats where they could sit and see them. 
 He encouraged with all his might the Knights 
 Templars, so that they established that restau- 
 rant where I met you yesterday."
 
 TEMPERANCE. 20/ 
 
 " The Take it Easy,'" I said ; "I was delighted 
 with the name." 
 
 They both laughed. " That is one of Dick's 
 notions. He had it on the brain. He said that 
 the hands must learn not to hurry when they 
 ate, or as they amused themselves. Well, the 
 Take it Easy is a Co-operation enterprise. I 
 really believe they pay a dividend at the end of 
 the year to everybody who drinks a glass of soda 
 or eats a bowl of oysters. Sheridan joined in 
 with the Knights with all his zeal to have it 
 carried through, and it is really now a great com- 
 fort and convenience to us all. 
 
 " You see it was the old stage-house of the 
 place, even before there were any mills here. 
 A great square brick tavern, probably a great 
 deal too large at its best. We have almost no 
 travellers or visitors. In the old regime here, 
 they made it pay, somehow, by keeping the bar 
 pretty active. We had abolished all that. 
 
 "Accordingly, very soon after we were in full 
 blast, the owners came to me to know what we 
 would do with it. I did not choose to be em- 
 barrassed by them or their notions, and Spinner 
 agreed with me. We took it off their hands at 
 a very low price, and it is now a part of the 
 property of this company. Then we took the 
 same ground which we took about the store 
 and about the tenements. We meant to make
 
 208 now TIIF.V LIVED I\ HAMPTON, 
 
 our money by manufacturing goods. Our other 
 ]:)ropcrty must pay us the ' idiot's dividend ' 
 and the taxes. So the Knights Templars under- 
 took to swing this thing. They have their own 
 club-rooms there, — they have a chess-room, 
 where they play more checkers and backgam- 
 mon than chess, I think, — they have a billiard- 
 room, — they have their own reading-room. But 
 gradually the restaurant grew, and it now takes, 
 as you saw, the whole ground floor. The men 
 sit there and talk politics, and discuss boat-races 
 and ball games. It is a place of resort. You 
 can order something to drink, just as in old 
 times. But it is one of Eaton's fifty-seven tem- 
 perance drinks, and nobody has a headache the 
 next morning. 
 
 "Eaton sent them up the man they have there, 
 and he and his wife have a genius for making 
 the place attractive. In the first place, their 
 things are good. Their coffee is matchless, and 
 their bouillon. Well, the place is pretty, — there 
 are always fresh flowers, and in summer it is 
 cool, and in winter it is warm. There is a room 
 where the women can look in, and be by them- 
 selves, and have a cup of tea if they choose. 
 They are not locked out, and come and go as the 
 rest of us do. That gives it all a home look. 
 It breaks up all temptation to have little sepa- 
 rate ' treats ' in little dirty club-rooms, that Good-
 
 TEMPERANCE. 
 
 209 
 
 year here will give any party a much better 
 entertainment than anybody else can, and it 
 costs them less. 
 
 " Now, observe, all this goes forward as a 
 thing of course. But it is not a thing of course. 
 You do not usually find what is called a temper- 
 ance hotel to approach the Take it Easy in ele- 
 gance or neatness or attractiveness. But noth- 
 ing is said about liquor, more than anything 
 would be said about opium at Delmonico's. 
 They would not assure their guests there that 
 no opium was served, — and Goodyear does not 
 assure his guests that no liquor is served. 
 'They take it for granted,' he says, — ' they take 
 it for granted that I know how to keep a place 
 of resort for gentlemen.' " 
 
 So much for what Workman meant by over- 
 coming evil by good. But all of them said, very 
 seriously, that an active temperance "propa- 
 ganda " was necessary, all the same. Holmes 
 said to me that he knew what temptations his 
 boys and girls were to meet, and he wanted them 
 to be forewarned. They had the best temperance 
 speakers, and had them often. The Women's 
 Christian Temperance Union had a branch there, 
 the Templars, and some of the ether societies. 
 The boys and girls grew up with the feeling that 
 when they left Hampton to live in larger places, 
 where there was much temptation, and where
 
 2IO HOW TIIF.V LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 they saw the open sale of liquor at the bar, that 
 they were, in some sort, the apostles of a new 
 order. They had something of the j^ride which 
 the graduate of a well-equipped college has, when 
 he descends among what he thinks, for the time, 
 inferior people. 
 
 They wanted, if they could, to do their part 
 in extending a system which they had learned 
 to love. If they had not had this positive wish 
 to be of use in the temperance cause, all the 
 negative effect of the plans which had been 
 made for them would have been useless. But, 
 as they did wish to help their comrades, they 
 themselves were the more sure.
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 
 
 UNDER the old order of things at Hamp- 
 ton, before Thankful Nourse and Spinner 
 bought the property, there had been an old- 
 fashioned Savings Bank. Such institutions 
 have been very generally established in the 
 New England factory-towns, to the very great 
 advantage of all concerned. The administra- 
 tion of them has generally been careful and 
 honorable. The supervision by the authorities 
 of the states is severe and close, and there have 
 not been many instances in which the depositors 
 have lost anything by the infidelity of the cus- 
 todians or by their carelessness. On the other 
 hand, the custom of depositing money even in 
 very small sums in these banks has become gen- 
 eral, it would be almost fair to say universal. 
 In the state of Massachusetts, with a population 
 of 1,976,264, there were last year 906,039 dif- 
 ferent accounts in these institutions. This 
 shows that almost every working man and 
 working woman must have had an account in 
 one of them or another. The average sum to
 
 212 HOW THEV LIVED IX HAMPTON. 
 
 the credit of each depositor was ^321.00, the 
 largest deposit permitted by the law being 
 $5000.00. The total amount was $291,197,- 
 900.96.^ Persons who have more money to 
 deposit are expected to place it in other invest- 
 ments. 
 
 The success of the savings bank system in 
 America is largely due to the spirit in which it 
 was conceived. The history of these banks 
 shows that they were not founded in the miser- 
 able idea of some bold speculator, who foresaw 
 the immense sums which would be at the direc- 
 tion of their managers, and was eager to con- 
 trol the investment of these funds. They were, 
 on the other hand, set on foot by high-minded 
 Christian people, who were eager in their wish 
 to improve the condition of poor people, to give 
 to them the same rights in the use of their little 
 earnings which the rich had in the use of theirs, 
 and to encourage, in whatever way might be 
 possible, habits of prudence among the work- 
 people around them. It is the proud boast of 
 one of the associations of clergymen in Massa- 
 chusetts that the savings bank of the county, 
 one of the oldest in the state, was created by 
 the inspiration given at a "Minister's Meeting," 
 as the phrase of New England calls the meeting 
 
 1 The figures are for 1886.
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 21 3 
 
 of the association.^ The plan was proposed by 
 the wife of one of the ministers, herself in at- 
 tendance. She had read of the success of a 
 similar plan set on foot among the philanthropic 
 people of England. 
 
 In this spirit, to borrow Mr. Sherlock's text 
 again, those who had succeeded in business life 
 are willing to bear the burdens of those who are 
 yet to begin it. And to their willingness is due 
 the willingness of men of great business ability 
 to give their time and care to the administration 
 of these trusts, without compensation. It is 
 considered almost a point of honor among mer- 
 cantile men or bankers of ability and position, 
 to do their part in the proper supervision of the 
 savings banks of their towns. It will some- 
 times happen, undoubtedly, that a needy adven- 
 turer thinks it would be a good plan to establish 
 a new savings bank, of which he may be the 
 acting manager, with a good salary and the 
 advantages which fall to a man who directs 
 large investments. But if the bank is to suc- 
 ceed, it must be able to show the names of a 
 board of directors respected in the community 
 for business sagacity and honor. The adven- 
 turer who proposes it may sing never so sweetly, 
 and advertise never so widely. His bank will 
 
 1 The Worcester Association.
 
 214 HOW TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 not attract many depositors until they know who 
 is to have tlic oversight of their money. 
 
 The direction of savings banks, then, so 
 that the depositors may be sure of a fair in- 
 come, and that their funds are not wasted, 
 becomes one of the unpaid pubhc duties of 
 Christian men, who know that all their time 
 and talents are given to them as a trust, and 
 who mean to use that trust for the benefit of 
 their fellows. 
 
 The little bank at Hampton, under the old ad- 
 ministration of the mills there, had been well ad- 
 ministered, and had kept its fair share of deposits 
 from the savings of the work-people. But when 
 hard times came, as the pay-days were more 
 uncertain, and when at last the old company 
 failed, the people had moved away, one after 
 another, and had, of course, withdrawn their 
 deposits, — perhaps, alas ! to pay the charges of 
 moving ; or, at best, to deposit them in banks 
 nearer to their new homes. As the managers 
 of the mills left, they had withdrawn, so soon as 
 they could, from their places on the board of 
 administration, and the Savings Bank was little 
 more than a name and a sign on the wall of the 
 bank building, when the renewal of Hampton 
 began. 
 
 Mr. Spinner told me that, as soon as he got 
 the machinery into working order, he called
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 21 5 
 
 Mr. Nourse's attention to the necessity of 
 awakening new confidence in the bank, and 
 found, to his satisfaction, that he saw the neces- 
 sity plainly. Whatever else he thought visionary 
 or fanciful, in the notions and wishes of these 
 working people, he did not think any plans for 
 saving money fanciful. He knew too well that 
 he should never have been a capatalist had he 
 not, as he said, "salted down " ten per cent of 
 his income, since he had sold a string of trout 
 at a hotel for a quarter of a dollar. On Mr. 
 Spinner's appeal, therefore, he agreed to be 
 one of the trustees of the bank, knowing that 
 he could attend to that duty without personal 
 attendance at all the meetings of the managers. 
 And he interested himself personally in induc- 
 ing gentlemen of position, character, and means 
 in the neighborhood, to take necessary trust 
 and care of its management. When they took 
 the bank in hand, the deposits were at the very 
 lowest ebb. Be, with the improvement in the 
 prosperity of Hampton, the working men and 
 women, and even the children, began to open 
 their accounts. The bank received as small 
 sums as five cents at a time, and began to allow 
 interest on the first of every month after the 
 deposit was made. It does not take long to 
 teach young people what is the value of an 
 arrangement by which their little wealth grows
 
 2l6 now TllEV LIVED IN HAMPTON, 
 
 while they are asleep, or seems to do so. And, 
 with the steadiness of management, and the evi- 
 dent care taken of their property by men who 
 were among the most distinguished in the neigh- 
 borhood, almost all the people of Hampton were 
 disposed to place their earnings, as far as they 
 could save them, for a few months in the keep- 
 ing of the savings bank. 
 
 Spinner said that, so far, their experience was 
 only the same as that of hundreds of other insti- 
 tutions of the same kind in different parts of the 
 northern states, and he said that he did not 
 know but that their bank would have remained 
 exactly like all other American savings banks, 
 but from the accident that they had a German 
 named Scheffer at the head of the dyeing- 
 room. Scheffer came to Spinner one day in 
 a good deal of indignation, and it was some 
 time before Spinner found out what the matter 
 was. The German had been a depositor in the 
 bank from the very beginning, and this, Spinner, 
 who was one of the directors, knew perfectly 
 well. His wife was another, a nephew he had 
 was another, a grown-up son had a small de- 
 posit, and one or two of the children had bank 
 books also, with their little savings entered 
 upon them. Spinner had always supposed that 
 Scheffer was one of the people best satisfied 
 with the arrangements of the bank, as he had
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 21/ 
 
 often heard him speak, in a cordial way, of the 
 simphcity and dignity with which its business 
 was conducted. He was all the more surprised 
 on this particular occasion, which proved to be a 
 critical occasion, to find that Scheffer was in a 
 rage with the whole management of the institu- 
 tion, had given notice that he should with- 
 draw his funds on the first possible day when 
 he had the right to do so, and that every one in 
 his room would do the same. Spinner soothed 
 him as well as he could, made him tell the 
 whole story from the beginning to the end, 
 and then was amazed to find that the German 
 was disappointed and disgusted because the 
 treasurer of the bank had refused to discount 
 a little note for him. 
 
 Spinner at once entered on an explanation, 
 in as moderate and gentle language as he 
 could, to show his German friend that such a 
 thing was utterly unheard of in the savings 
 banks of New England as a small discount 
 on a small note, given on personal security. 
 He tried to make Scheffer understand that 
 the general policy, from the beginning of 
 these institutions, had been to avoid any re- 
 semblance to the working of the ordinary banks 
 of discount, and that they had been adminis- 
 tered also as trust funds, in which, naturally 
 enough, the larger the investment the better
 
 2l8 HOW TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 for the persons concerned, because there is the 
 less expense of handling and oversight. He 
 cited to him that remark of Josiah Quincy's, 
 which has been already quoted in another part 
 of this essay. He said, with some humor, that 
 the palaces of Boston were built with the 
 money of the servant-girls of Boston. It is 
 perfectly true that those servant-girls have 
 given to the great savings banks the money 
 which those banks lend out, on the perfect 
 security of mortgages, on the palaces of which 
 Mr. Ouincy was speaking. Spinner tried to 
 explain to his angry friend that if he wanted a 
 little money, he himself would gladly be his 
 security on a note which he could carry to the 
 nearest bank of discount, which was at Went- 
 worth, the large town of the neighborhood. 
 He told him that he would find that he was 
 perfectly well known to the directors there, 
 and that they would be very glad to accommo- 
 date him, if he would take such a note as he 
 proposed. Spinner said to him : " I had occa- 
 sion to borrow a little money a fortnight ago, 
 and I went over there, with a note indorsed 
 by Freeman, and they lent me the money gladly. 
 That is what they are for, and that is the place 
 for you to go to." 
 
 Scheffer was toned down a little when he 
 found that his character had not been intention-
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 219 
 
 ally assailed by the treasurer of the bank, and 
 was soothed, as Spinner persuaded him that his 
 reputation had extended as far as Wentworth 
 and farther. But when the first tempest of his 
 rage was over, he continued to talk on the 
 subject, and to show what he thought the nar- 
 rowness of the restriction by which the treas- 
 urer had been bound. He then told Spinner, 
 what Spinner told me he did not know before, 
 that in his own country, the bank of savings 
 where he made his deposits would have been 
 at the same time a bank of discount, not in 
 general business, but restricted to a business 
 with those very persons who made the deposits. 
 He explained to him the system, simple enough 
 in operation, though a little complicated in de- 
 scription, by which the bank secured itself abso- 
 lutely for the small loans which it made to its 
 depositors. It might happen that a man wanted, 
 for temporary purposes, such as the furnishing 
 of his house, or the education of one of his 
 children, a sum of money larger than he had 
 himself on deposit in the bank. He would want 
 to borrow this money, and he would have friends 
 enough among the other depositors who were 
 confident in his integrity, or confident in the 
 purpose for which he needed the funds, to assist 
 him with their credit, as far as it would go. 
 What is the measure of such people's credit ?
 
 2 20 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 Clearly enough it is, so far as the bank is con- 
 cerned, estimated with perfect accuracy by the 
 deposits which they have in that institution. 
 If, then, Schcffcr wanted to borrow five hundred 
 dollars, as in this case he did want to borrow 
 that amount, if he had on deposit only three 
 hundred dollars, the bank would, with perfect 
 willingness, lend him the whole sum, if he would 
 bring them a note signed by himself and by two 
 of his companions, each of whom had deposits 
 of the same amount with his own, it being 
 understood upon the face of the note that they 
 were not to draw upon their deposits until the 
 note was paid, and that the note constituted 
 a lien, of which the bank could avail itself as 
 security for these indorsements. Of course no 
 security could be more absolute. The bank 
 itself holds the very property from which the 
 debt could be paid, if it should prove that the 
 indorsers must be called upon. Scheffer ex- 
 plained to Spinner, what Spinner did not know, 
 that there were thousands of such banks in 
 Germany, carr)dng on the double business of 
 receiving small deposits, and making small loans 
 to the depositors. 
 
 It is perfectly true to say, in theory, that the 
 ordinary New England system comes out at 
 the same thing. In the ordinary New England 
 system, the depositor places his money in the
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 221 
 
 savings bank, the savings bank loans the money 
 in considerable sums to capitalists and others 
 who handle considerable sums, and the bank 
 and the depositor then receive the advantage 
 of the interest paid upon such loans. If it 
 happens that the depositor wants bank accom- 
 modation, he goes to an entirely different insti- 
 tution, — as in this case Schcffer would have to 
 go to the bank of discount at Wentworth, — and 
 he avails himself there of such credit as he has, 
 founded upon his property or upon his reputa- 
 tion, and borrows the money he needs. Or, 
 without borrowing money, he withdraws the 
 whole of his deposit, uses that in his specula- 
 tion, whatever it is, and when the speculation 
 is ended, makes his deposit anew. But it is 
 easy to see that all this means in practice is, 
 that it shall be difficult, not to say impossible, 
 for dealers in money on a small scale to obtain 
 money at banks of discount. The banks of 
 discount do not want such customers ; human 
 nature is weak, and the average cashier of a 
 bank prefers to deal with large custom^ers than 
 with small customers, and to have its business 
 conducted in large sums than in small sums. 
 In practice, therefore, a man who wants to 
 borrow small sums of money is obliged to bor- 
 row, in the expensive and cumbrous system 
 which sends him to a pawnbroker, and his range
 
 222 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 of credit is only as large as that very limited 
 rang^c which can be represented by the articles 
 which he can put in deposit as security for his 
 loan. 
 
 The German system, on the other hand, gives 
 to the man exactly the credit that he is entitled 
 to. It enables his friends, though they be in 
 the humblest walks of life, and be persons of 
 very little means, to come to his assistance, for 
 whatever purpose he needs money, just as far 
 as their means will go and they are disposed. 
 In this particular case of Scheffer's, where his 
 anger had been so intensely excited by the 
 refusal of the treasurer, he had offered to the 
 treasurer absolute security for every cent he 
 wanted to borrow, and had offered it to him in 
 the very simple form of proposing to place with 
 him the bank books of his friends, amounting 
 to a sum much larger than that he proposed to 
 borrow. The treasurer had refused, because he 
 was not in the habit of doing such things. This 
 reason, usually alleged by persons in such posi- 
 tions, had not satisfied Scheffer, and hence his 
 towering rage. 
 
 It was in every way desirable to conciliate 
 Scheffer in this particular instance. The direc- 
 tors of the bank did not want to have one im- 
 portant sub-department of the bank alienated, 
 nor did they want to have the German part
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 223 
 
 of their constituency disaffected to their man- 
 agement. Mr. Spinner, therefore, brought the 
 matter up at the next directors' meeting. And, 
 in the first place, it was voted that the security 
 offered by Mr. Scheffer for the loan he wanted 
 was entirely satisfactory, and that the treasurer 
 be directed to lend to him the amount he asked 
 for, as soon as he had that amount for use. 
 But, what was much more important, a com- 
 mittee was appointed, which should draw up a 
 practicable plan, in which any one of the de- 
 positors might borrow money in small sums if 
 he needed, even though the sum asked for was 
 larger than he had on deposit himself, if he 
 offered the names, as his indorsers, of men 
 who had themselves deposits equal to the 
 amount borrowed ; these depositors giving the 
 amount they had in the bank as their security 
 for the fulfilment of their obligation. All this, 
 of course, made it necessary to open some new 
 books, and, indeed, developed a side of the 
 bank which was not contemplated in the sys- 
 tem to which it belonged. But it did not prove 
 that it required any new legislation, for these 
 banks always had the power to lend money on 
 personal security, if this security were satisfac- 
 tory to the directors, and were such that they 
 could readily call in the amount which they had 
 lent, when the exigencies of the bank required.
 
 224 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 Clearly enough, no security could be better than 
 that which these directors had, for the funds of 
 the indorsers and the principal were in their 
 own keeping, and they were responsible for 
 them. 
 
 The old-fashioned theory, in favor of which 
 much may be said, is, that it is not well to 
 facilitate the borrowing of money when the bor- 
 rower is poor. The proverb, which, though 
 somewhat irreverent, is quite true, might have 
 a wider application to advantage. It says that 
 "Debt is the devil." In the sense intended, it 
 is very desirable that everybody, the rich and 
 the poor, should take to heart the lesson which 
 is involved in this epigrammatic expression. 
 At the same time, as every man of affairs 
 knows, it is necessary sometimes that a man 
 w^ho has no ready money, but has other prop- 
 erty, should be able to borrow ready money on 
 the security of that property. It is impossible 
 to give any fair reason why this privilege should 
 not be open to poor men as it is open to rich 
 men, in proportion to the property which they 
 have to offer for their security. The poor man 
 is as eager to take care of his little as the rich 
 man is to take care of his great. Probably it 
 will prove that the poor man is more watchful 
 over the sum which he has to put at risk than 
 is the man who is used to larger advantages.
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 22 5 
 
 In such a case as we had under our eyes at 
 Hampton, there was really no danger that the 
 friends and neighbors of Scheffer should be less 
 anxious for the security of their little property 
 than he was for the security of his. They did 
 not give their indorsements without such con- 
 sideration as they thought sufficient. It was 
 nobody's business what those considerations 
 Vv^ere, — whether they were considerations of 
 friendship, gratitude, or some greedy hope that 
 in the future he would do the like by them. It 
 was nobody's business to inquire as to their 
 motives, or as to what the result would be to 
 them. So far as the bank officers had any- 
 thing to do with the matter, they had to pre- 
 serve the property which was intrusted to them, 
 and to invest it safely. This they were able to 
 do, at some expense of worry and time in the 
 account keeping, by as simple an arrangement 
 as that which was adopted. 
 
 And it had not proved that the people were 
 misled into any extravagant speculations by 
 such a convenient arrangement for borrowing 
 small sums of money. Up to a certain point, a 
 man of good reputation and established position 
 could induce fellow-depositors to indorse his 
 note so that he could borrow money. But he 
 could not do this unless he showed them why 
 he wanted the money, and unless they had
 
 226 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 reason to believe he would be able to meet his 
 note and theirs when it became due. The 
 friends whom I talked with had satisfied them- 
 selves that the system worked well, and ex- 
 pressed their surprise that it had not been more 
 generally introduced as a part of the practice of 
 the smaller savings banks of the country. 
 
 In one of our talks about the bank and its 
 results I asked some general questions about 
 their charities. 
 
 Mr. Spinner said in reply that if I lived with 
 them a little longer I should see that they were 
 just like other people, and that they did not 
 need any other organization of charity or insti- 
 tutions for taking care of the sick or aged than 
 other people did. " Because a man works in a 
 mill, he is not a different sort of man. Half 
 the absurdities which get into print about what 
 they call the 'labor problem,' and, worse than 
 that, sometimes come into disastrous action, 
 spring from this notion, that the world is di- 
 vided into men and women and 'operatives.' 
 * Operatives ' is a Latin word which has been 
 chosen to represent this outside being, who is 
 not exactly human. Now if he had three legs, 
 or two mouths, or walked on his head, it might 
 be all right to classify him so, and to provide 
 for him separately. But, — as he is just like 
 other men, — as he is like farmers and sailors
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 22^ 
 
 and lawyers, it seems more possible to treat 
 him as other men are treated, and not to un- 
 dertake to separate him off into a class, as peo- 
 ple call it, with its peculiar institutions, whether 
 of charity or government or other arrangement 
 of civil order." 
 
 I had learned by this time that this was a 
 matter about which Spinner felt rather extrava- 
 gantly, and which he discussed rather warmly. 
 I had no wish to provoke an angry discussion, 
 but I said that I did not mean to offend him. 
 "But certainly there are differences," I said, 
 " between the hands in the Hampton mills and 
 as many farmers in the valley above and the 
 valley below. The great difference is that they 
 have to work when the mill works. Their hours 
 of work have to fit in with the hours when the 
 machinery is going. Now the farmer works fif- 
 teen hours a day, or five hours a day, or none. 
 In this distinction there is a difference, and it is 
 as well to acknowledge it." 
 
 By this time Spinner had cooled down, and he 
 said he hoped he had not spoken too warmly. 
 "But the truth is," said he, "that you have 
 stated precisely the distinction, such as it is, 
 between us here and other work-people. These 
 young men whom you see in my room are not 
 chained to this machinery. That one whom I 
 call Bob came to me this morning to say that he
 
 228 now TllKV LIVED IX HAMPTON. 
 
 had engaged for the next summer with the peo- 
 ple at Mount Pleasant. He is to be at the head 
 of their livery stable there. The man who 
 brought me the patterns just now has been out 
 in Dakota with his brother, who has a farm 
 there. He will go again, one of these days, — 
 is, indeed, of rather a restless turn, — but I sup- 
 pose that is good for him. And the girls and 
 women come and go in the same fashion. 
 
 " Now, to answer your question, as perhaps I 
 should have done before, such people, living in 
 the same life as the rest of the world, need no 
 special system for their old age, or their sick- 
 ness, or 'other infirmity.' What is good for 
 farmers or lawyers or editors or doctors is good 
 for them. But they need nothing more, and they 
 take nothing up. When you come to speak of 
 Lowell, or Philadelphia, or Chicago, you speak 
 of something different from Hampton. But 
 you need higher organization of your charities 
 there, not because you are dealing with work- 
 men, but because you are dealing with large 
 cities. As to large cities — well, I am very 
 much of Jefferson's notion." 
 
 " What was that ? " I asked. 
 
 " Oh, he said large cities are large sores. I 
 think Sallust thought so. To go back. It is 
 true, and I am rather proud to say it, that the 
 English W'Orkingmen, and not the French theo-
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 229 
 
 rists, developed and worked out all the detail of 
 the magnificent Friendly Societies, which, under 
 one name or another, cover the whole land, and 
 make what is technically called ' charity ' the 
 less necessary. Providence, prudence, is a great 
 deal better than charity. And if a ' Forester,' 
 or a ' Druid,' or an ' Odd Fellow ' has had at 
 once the Christian kindness and the Saxon good 
 sense to pay regularly his monthly dues to the 
 lodge, or camp, or chapter of the order to which 
 he belongs, why, he has saved society no end of 
 trouble in bothering about his widow and his 
 orphans. I am not a Freemason. But I am 
 disposed to think that their arrangements for 
 mutual help, or what is really a sickness and 
 death insurance, have been very much enlarged 
 in the last half-century. However that is, I am 
 sure that these other orders, Rechabites, Knights 
 of Honor, Odd Fellows, Druids, Foresters, Sons 
 of Temperance, and the rest, give to everybody 
 opportunities for providing for an evil day, so 
 general and so careful that we have no need of 
 establishing separate plans of our own, in as 
 small a place as Hampton. 
 
 •' It all comes to mutual insurance. In fact, 
 as you know, some of the associations simply 
 take the name of Mutual Insurance Companies. 
 Some of them, indeed, do not collect their dues 
 until the exact occasion comes when the money
 
 230 HOW TIIEV LIVED IX HAMPTON. 
 
 is needed. In a small club of a thousand mem- 
 bers you will receive a note which says that our 
 brother, Mr. Jones, fell from a roof yesterday, 
 or died with typhoid, or was drowned at sea last 
 week, and that the secretary knows you will be 
 glad to pay two dollars, as you are bound to do, 
 by the way, for the fund now due to his widow. 
 Well, there is a certain advantage in that plan. 
 You see, and cannot help seeing, how good a 
 thing you are engaged in. You are sorry for 
 the widow ; you are glad you did not fall from 
 the roof yourself. And you pay your two dol- 
 lars with a sort of personal interest that a man 
 does not always feel in paying a money assess- 
 ment. But, of course, the principle is the same. 
 You are trained to laying up something for an 
 evil day ; and, — here is the important thing, — 
 you are trained to remember that no misfortune 
 comes to you that is not 'common to man,' as 
 the Bible says. You are trained to do your 
 part, as a Christian man, for all the others. 
 
 " For, no matter what name the thing takes, 
 all this mutual provision and care is a part of 
 the Christian religion. It is all part of 'The 
 Way.' It was set on foot by Jesus Christ, as 
 distinctly as if He had dictated the constitution 
 of a company to St. Peter. If we were each 
 and all so many separate, selfish bodies, we 
 should not do such things. It is because we
 
 THE SAVINGS BANK. 23 1 
 
 are children of God, whom Christ died to save, 
 that we do such things, and encourage other 
 people to do them. Whether a lodge meeting 
 opens with prayer or not, all the same it was 
 founded the day Jesus Christ was born, and it 
 never would exist were it not for His Gospel."
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 WORK AND LABOR. 
 
 I WAS to make a little speech at a picnic of 
 a few of the hands one afternoon, and I 
 asked Mr. Spinner's advice as to what I should 
 say. 
 
 " Pray speak to them as you would speak to 
 anybody else," he said, reverting to his old sen- 
 sitive feeling of dislike for anything which, in 
 our hard-working country, made workmen into a 
 "class." "But if you must make distinctions, 
 do not call us 'laborers,' and do not talk of the 
 'dignity of labor.'" 
 
 "Why not.'" said I, dully enough. "Is not 
 all that you do intended to give dignity to labor, 
 and are you not all laborers .'' " 
 
 " No," said Spinner, with an nitentional ex- 
 pression of indignation. " I am afraid that 
 there are one or two laboring men about, dig- 
 ging post-holes, or at work in the bottom of the 
 flume, but they are all trying to rise from the 
 grade of laborers to the grade of workmen. 
 Labor is always wearing, fatiguing, repulsive, 
 and every man who is a man is always trying to
 
 WORK AND LABOR. 233 
 
 replace it by some less wearing, less repulsive, 
 and less fatiguing process. That is to say, the 
 whole of what you call civilization consists in 
 substituting Work, which is the conquest of mat- 
 ter by spirit, for Labor, in which a man throws 
 his own dead weight or muscle against the dead 
 weight of the clod he is handling." 
 
 Here was a bit of philology which interested 
 me, and I made Spinner follow it out. He said 
 that it had been an immense satisfaction to him, 
 when the late Dr. Bethune of Brooklyn called his 
 attention to the radical distinction between the 
 two words. He told me that I should find the 
 distinction carefully carried out in the English 
 Bible. He said that God is always spoken of as 
 working, never as laboring. He said that when 
 the righteous die, they cease from their labors, 
 but their works follow them, — for that angels 
 and archangels are fellow-workers with God 
 Himself. Labors, he said, are spoken of in the 
 correct English of the Bible as we speak of 
 toils, or drudgery, with persecutions and ship- 
 wrecks, and other finite necessities of a finite 
 world. But Paul and the other saints are al- 
 ways hoping to be released from their labors, 
 while they, also, like angels and archangels, are 
 glad to be fellow-workmen with God. He even 
 said that the one place where Paul called him- 
 self a fellow-laborer with God, in our Bible, was
 
 234 ''OW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 a slip of the translators, and that it had been 
 corrected in the revised version. 
 
 I asked him if Dr. Bethune had ever printed 
 his study of this subject. He said he had never 
 seen his address in print. But he gave me an 
 address of his own, which I am glad to copy here. 
 For Spinner's mock rage was really sublime, 
 when he ridiculed the stump orators who came 
 up to political meetings in October about the 
 " dignity of labor." " Probably not one of them 
 ever did an honest day's work in his life," Spin- 
 ner said, grimly. " If he had, he would talk 
 about the dignity of work, and leave labor where 
 it belongs." I chaffed Spinner a little, for I 
 told him he was himself making the classifica- 
 tion against which he warned me, — only he was 
 making a class of laborers. 
 
 " I make a class of laborers ! " he cried ; 
 " Heaven forbid. No, I am doing all I can to 
 reduce the amount of necessary labor, and to sub- 
 stitute work for it, — as when the steam derrick 
 lifts those stones, which ten years ago would 
 have been lifted by the labor of men." And on 
 this I went off to prepare myself for the picnic 
 by reading the lecture. 
 
 It had been prepared for one of their own ly- 
 ceum courses. But I saw by the notes on the 
 cover that he had delivered it in a good many 
 of the neighboring towns ; and when I read it,
 
 WORK AND LABOR. 235 
 
 I was glad that it had been favorably received. 
 For, as the reader will see, the doctrine of the 
 lecture went a good deal beyond a mere specula- 
 tion on the use of English words, and involved 
 a good many of the principles on which the 
 social order of our modern life depends. 
 
 After an introduction half in joke, in which 
 he described, with a good deal of humor, the 
 political shyster, who appears once a year, pos- 
 ing as the "friend of labor," Spinner went into 
 the etymology of the words " labor " and " work." 
 He cited from Shakespeare and Milton expres- 
 sions which showed their use of them. 
 
 That is, he contrasted 
 
 "Painful labors both by sea and land" 
 against 
 
 "Come, let us to our holy work again." 
 
 And he took from Milton, 
 
 " Body shall up to spirit work," 
 and, 
 
 " Our better part remains to work in close design," 
 
 which he contrasted against the phrase, 
 
 " Those afflictions you now labor under." 
 
 " But this classical use of language, if I may 
 so call it, is not yet old-fashioned. Go out on 
 the platform of a railroad station, — go forward 
 and speak to the engineer. 'We are not on
 
 236 HOW TllKV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 time, Mr. Stevenson. What's the matter.?' 'I 
 don't just know, sir, but she kil)ors badly on the 
 up-g'rade.' But suppose it is the other way, and 
 you say to your Mr. Stevenson, ' You're run- 
 ning on time to-night.' 'Ah, yes,' he says, 
 with a broad grin ; 'she works well' That man 
 knows the difference between 'labor,' which 
 always wears out, — that is what the word means 
 in Latin, — and 'work,' which never hurt any- 
 body or anything, when it was used in the 
 proper way and the proper proportion. They 
 would tell you the same thing when the Puritan 
 ran her race against the Galatea. If the sailing- 
 master were satisfied, he would nod his head, 
 and he would say, ' Does she not work well .'' ' 
 And if he were dissatisfied, — why, if the man 
 did not swear, it would be well, but he would be 
 sure to say that she 'labored' with every wave 
 of the sea. 
 
 " The Digger Indian, so long as he digs with 
 his hands, is a fit type of the laborer. Robinson 
 Crusoe, — when he was flung upon the beach, 
 without any tools, to work with his bare hands 
 and feet, — he was a laborer. He had to bend 
 down the trees to make his wigwam. If he was 
 heavy enough, — if they broke where he wanted, 
 or bent as he chose, — happy for him, — he was 
 a successful laborer. But it was his dead weight, 
 and the dead pull of his muscles, by which he
 
 WORK AND LABOR. 237 
 
 succeeded. Robinson Crusoe, when he put a 
 lever under a stone, so that with half the labor 
 he could do the same work, became a workman. 
 Why, as lately as when the dam was built here, 
 which holds back the water for our mills, the 
 drilling of the holes in the granite for the split- 
 ting of the stone was all so much dead labor. 
 Ten or twelve good fellows — how I pity them, 
 and so do you — stood on the edge of the quarry 
 there, with ten or twelve heavy drills, and all 
 day long had to thump, thump, thump, as they 
 made the long holes into the hard stone for the 
 blast of the evening. Did my friend, the Hon- 
 orable Slippery Gabbletongue, go up and tell 
 them that labor was honorable ? Did he tell them 
 so in a practical way, by taking any man's drill 
 from him, and sending him off to the next pri- 
 mary meeting, while he drilled ? Not he. Mr. 
 Gabbletongue was in the drummer's room, up at 
 the hotel, preparing his notes on the ' toil-worn 
 craftsman.' The ten or twelve good fellows 
 thumped away there, till one fine day, a real re- 
 former, a man who knew the difference between 
 labor and work, looked in upon them. And he 
 set up — you have seen it — a little portable 
 boiler and engine there. As long as he wanted, 
 it drove, not ten drills, but thirty. And one or 
 two good fellows tended the drills, in careful and 
 delicate work, while the little spitting engine
 
 23S HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 did all the labor. And your friend, Mr. Willing, 
 tended the gauges and the escape-valve, and lay 
 in the shade and read Henry George, or wrote 
 a love-letter. He and his two workmen did 
 three times what was done before. And this 
 was because they substituted a little intelligent 
 work for a great deal of unintelligent labor. 
 
 "Simply, my friends, the advance which the 
 world has made in its commerce, its manufac- 
 ture, and all its social order, since the year 1775, 
 — when Watt and Bolton spoke the word and 
 freed the people, — has been in this line of the 
 diminution of labor, while true work is substi- 
 tuted in its place. I rode into the woods, fifty 
 miles up the river, last fall. What did I find 
 there .■* I found a settler clearing out his farm, 
 in a new precinct. Was he swinging the axe, 
 as the ' grand old man ' does when he wants to 
 take exercise .'' He was reading a newspaper. 
 He had one of Whittier and Woodruff's little 
 horse-powers by the road, — he had his old gray 
 nag at work in it ; his boy Tom was training a 
 circular saw upon the log in question ; and in a 
 tenth part of the time which the laboring man 
 would have needed with his axe, the old gray 
 had done the business. Labor was relegated to 
 the brutes, — where in the end it belongs, — 
 and intelligent work was there in its place. 
 
 "But it is not brutes alone, or chiefly, who
 
 WORK AND LABOR, 239 
 
 are thus drawn into the service of man to take 
 his labors for him. There are these giants 
 whom man has created, — whom he commands, 
 — as Aladdin commanded his slaves. It is a 
 slavery, thank God, without a lash or a scar. 
 Watt and Bolton first, and since them more 
 inventors than can be named, coming down to 
 our own Corliss and so many of our American 
 inventors, have been calling into being these 
 giants, whose bones are of wood and iron and 
 brass and steel, and bidding them do our bid- 
 ding. And here at the Falls, you have, in the 
 same way, with our turbines and our flume, 
 compelled the tireless waterfall to take our 
 labor, while we work. The workmen I am 
 speaking to know what progress has been made 
 in the last generation in this direction. But all 
 of you may not know that in the manufacture 
 of cotton cloth, for instance, thirty hands will 
 now do the work which required a hundred 
 hands only thirty years ago. I say, do the 
 work. In my strict sense of the word, not one 
 of those hands is a laborer. He is a skilled 
 workman; and just as the cutler of to-day does 
 not drive his own stone, the spinner of to-day 
 does not twist his own thread, nor the weaver 
 drive his own shuttle. The labor is done for 
 him by the waterfall or by the piston. 
 
 " And what has become of the seventy men
 
 240 now TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 and women set free from the work of spinning 
 the thread or weaving the web ? Here is the 
 most interesting result of all. What is the new 
 variety of industry, — what is the wide range of 
 art and manufacture, but the immediate product 
 of the hands and the heads of these men and 
 women who have new fields of adventure to 
 try, who profit by the new inventions, and find 
 new work, of grades more and more interesting, 
 open before them .-' You have the marvels of 
 electricity. You have callings created by them. 
 You have all the wonderful fertility of fine art. 
 Your homes are bright with pictures and books, 
 cheaper than ever and better than ever. Trav- 
 elling becomes a luxury ; and it is the luxury of 
 the poor, where it was the necessity of the rich. 
 Gradually but certainly the day's work shortens ; 
 yet the world's product enlarges. Prices stead- 
 ily fall. Comfort steadily increases. And all 
 this is exactly in proportion as, by an intelligent 
 invention, we substitute work for labor." 
 
 At this point a double black line was drawn 
 across Spinner's manuscript, and the next page 
 was left blank. It was clear enough that a 
 pause was made here in delivery, — perhaps 
 what the old lecturers called an "intermission." 
 The address then went on in a somewhat differ- 
 ent vein. 
 
 " I hope no man or woman hears me who
 
 WORK AND LABOR. 24 1 
 
 thinks the distinction I have drawn is a mere 
 matter of the dictionary-makers or word-spKt- 
 ters. I liate them and their deeds. I dare not 
 try to say how much evil they have done to this 
 world, and especially to industry — honest indus- 
 try — and to work — honest work. The curse 
 — may I say it .'' — of the Son of God is upon 
 so many of them, where, in that terrible de- 
 scription of His, in the shortest words of our 
 language. He speaks of those who 'say and do 
 not.' I would be dumb rather than come here 
 to entertain you with a mere discussion of 
 words. 
 
 " No ; I have dwelt on the difference between 
 the two words because I want to show the dif- 
 ference between two things. There are coun- 
 tries and there are times in which there is a 
 great deal of labor and very little work. There 
 are barbarous countries and barbarous times. 
 There are other countries and other times where 
 there is a great deal of work and very little 
 labor. Such, thank God, is our country and 
 this time ; and we call it a civilized country and 
 a civilized age simply because there is much 
 work and little labor. But, my friends, we do 
 not know — we do not begin to know — what 
 we mean by that great word 'civilization.' If 
 our children know, — and I hope they will, — it 
 will be because we are faithful to our part in
 
 242 HOW TIli:V LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 substituting work for labor. We must do our 
 part to have the drudgery done by beasts, by 
 water, by steam, by electricity, and by any new 
 power which the genius of man, guided by the 
 Spirit of God, can tame. To make more places 
 for workmen, and to lift more laboring men into 
 these places, — this is our duty. 
 
 " We respect labor. Yes ; v/e respect any- 
 thing that is honest. But all the encourage- 
 ment we give to labor shall be the encourage- 
 ment a man gives to a tired boy on his long 
 walk. The walk shall soon be over, and the 
 rest from it shall be won. 
 
 " It is our business, first of all, to encourage 
 the laboring man, by opening to him every pos- 
 sible line of promotion, that he may become a 
 workman. Help him to go to the evening 
 school. Help him with his books. Encourage 
 his children in the same way. Do not ask him 
 nor expect him to remain a drudge or a laborer 
 long ; but show him that, in a country like ours, 
 the lines of promotion are always open. These 
 few years of labor are like the voyage of the 
 sea-sick passenger, every day of which brings 
 him nearer to the promised land. 
 
 " If you will tell him the truth, you can make 
 him see this. We have very accurate knowl- 
 edge of the proportion of laborers to workmen 
 in- Northern America. The statistics of Massa-
 
 WORK AND LABOR. 24J 
 
 chusetts are precise. They show us that of 
 the working force of that industrious common- 
 wealth only nine per cent are ' unskilled la- 
 borers.' The other ninety-one per cent are 
 workmen. They are conquering matter, not by 
 the matter in their bones and blood, but by the 
 immortal Spirit which comes from God. Only 
 one-eleventh of the force of Massachusetts are 
 laboring men and women. Now, suppose Mas- 
 sachusetts was an old-fashioned Japan. Suppose 
 there was a wall of fire around her, and no one 
 could come in. Suppose she said she would 
 compel her young men, as they started in life, 
 to do this heavy work, — to be her drudges and 
 laborers ; and that, when each had done it, she 
 would promote them to be workmen, — fellow- 
 workers with God Almighty ! They would only 
 have to toil in that drudgery four little years or 
 less. They would be for that time like the con- 
 scripts in a German army. In their young life 
 they would so serve the commonwealth that as 
 men and women they could rise to higher ser- 
 vice as workmen and workwomen, — yes, as the 
 directors of the drudges. Any man would say 
 that he would buy that emancipation by those 
 four years of drudgery, if that was the only 
 opening to it. 
 
 " Now these figures for Massachusetts arc 
 undoubtedly the figures for all the industrial
 
 244 J'^'^\' Tin:v i,i\'ed in hampton. 
 
 states of America. You have, then, a right to 
 say to that good fellow from Italy or from Hun- 
 gary who digs a ditch for you to-day, * Look 
 aloft, my friend ; look forward cheerfully. At 
 the most we only need you a few years in this 
 toil. And our schools are open, our library is 
 open, our shops are open, that you may leave 
 this toil and rise higher.' If the man turns you 
 off, — if he had rather drink bad beer and bad 
 whiskey all his life, and all his life be a beast, 
 a drudge, and a toilsman, — that is his affair. 
 But be sure you do your part to lift him higher. 
 Make him temperate. Teach him to read. 
 Teach him to write. Give him a chance to 
 draw. Give him a chance to use his hands. 
 Perhaps he can carve ; perhaps he can paint. 
 Show him that he has a mind. Show him this 
 by showing him that he has a soul. Let his 
 soul begin to use his mind and his body, and 
 you have made him free indeed. 
 
 " I spoke bitterly of those people who make 
 me sick. They are the people who talk all day, 
 when they know nothing, and have nothing to 
 tell me. They are like the Philadelphia print- 
 ing-presses in the Revolution, that clattered all 
 day and all night, and printed nothing but sheets 
 of Continental money, of which every word was 
 a visible lie. When a man like that looks into 
 my weaving-room, and sees an intelligent young
 
 WORK AND LABOR. 245 
 
 lady there overlooking four looms perhaps, gently 
 releasing a broken thread, quietly soothing a 
 squeaking pivot, — when one of these men calls 
 her afterward a person who works with her 
 hands, and in condescending contrast speaks of 
 himself as a person who works with his brain, 
 I want to knock the man down. Brain, indeed ! 
 Hand, indeed ! Her work is intellectual work 
 far more subtle than his. Let them be judged 
 by their fruits. At the end of a year she shows 
 so many bales of cloth, or, if you please, so 
 many men ' clothed in their right mind,' because 
 she gave her intelligence to clothing men. And 
 he shows — a ream of paper covered with an 
 infinite ocean of nothing. 
 
 " But I do not stop with our duty to educate 
 the laborer into a workman. Let us steadily, 
 in all lines of our duty, remember that there 
 should be no fixed and permanent class of 
 laborers. Let us arrange the laws, the customs, 
 and habits, as we arrange the education, of the 
 community, so that labor may be regarded as 
 simply a necessary preliminary to good work ; 
 as we inoculate a child, though we make him 
 sick for a week, in order that from one disease 
 he may be exempt forever. To do this, we 
 must highly disregard much that we find written 
 in the older books, when the laboring men made 
 three-quarters of a community, while now they
 
 246 now TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 make only one-eleventh, as I have shown you ; 
 and we must determine so to improve industry 
 and invention that ni twenty years that propor- 
 tion shall be reduced still farther, and there 
 shall be only five drudges, while there are nine- 
 ty-five men and women who have stepped for- 
 ward in man's great God-given duty of subduing 
 the world. Laws, customs, language, education, 
 fashions, — all must contribute to this advance 
 and reform. 
 
 " My contribution to it to-night, if I have in 
 the least succeeded, has been made in showing 
 you the object at which we are aiming. And 
 we are to remember that mere drudgery — I had 
 almost said, from its nature — degrades the 
 drudge, and tends to make him the mere beast 
 which he is called. In the mere infancy of 
 civilization, the kings of Europe punished men 
 by making of them galley-slaves. The severest 
 punishment was to make a man completely a 
 drudge. All day long, under the lash perhaps, 
 he was to pull at that heavy oar. Nay, to dis- 
 grace him the more, he was even made to pull 
 when his toil was wholly wasted, — when the 
 galley was anchored at the pier. The treadmill, 
 which I believe we never had in America, but 
 which I have myself seen in England, was in 
 practice the same thing. It merely took the 
 dead weight of the man. He walked up on
 
 WORK AND LABOR. 24/ 
 
 that moving stairway, — always stepping up and 
 never ascending. Why have these punishments 
 been abandoned, except in extreme cases .'' Why 
 would it be well to abandon them forever ? 
 Simply because they ruined the man. You 
 treated the man as if he were a beast, and, by 
 an infinite law he became a beast. The quality 
 of manhood is to look up, and to look forward. 
 You took the quality away when you repressed 
 it, — when you failed to use it. And just what 
 happened to those poor galley-slaves and tread- 
 mill men is what is likely to happen to any man 
 whom I compel to a life of mere brute toil, 
 unless you enlarge him by that noblest word, 
 'Friend, go up higher.' 
 
 " You may ask any temperance man, who is 
 a real workman in that great cause, whether 
 drudgery is not bad for a man's temperance. 
 Ask the Red Ribbon men where danger comes. 
 They will tell you that it comes when a man's 
 physical frame is exhausted by his day's toil, 
 and when he has no ambition to supply a higher 
 stimulus than that of alcohol. Tired to death, 
 with every muscle aching, with no chance of a 
 to-morrow any higher than to-day, or that next 
 year will be brighter than this year, the poor 
 creature goes into the liquor shop as he leaves 
 his drudgery. For my part, I do not wonder. 
 I can hardly say I blame him. I can say I pity
 
 248 now TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 him. And you know what follows. He forgets 
 his fatigue, he forgets that he is worn out. 
 There has been one cheerful hour after a day 
 of wretched toil, — and so, alas ! he comes again 
 and again, and at last you hear that the devil 
 who tempted him in has kicked the poor brute 
 out, because he has nothing to pay to his 
 tempter. You began by calling him ' poor man,' 
 and then you said 'poor creature,' and then you 
 said * poor brute.' That is, you condemned 
 him to the life of a brute, and to a brute's life 
 of appetite it reduced him. 
 
 " But, on the other hand, if I wanted to en- 
 courage and improve a gang of laboring men, 
 if I found the liquor-dealers had got hold of 
 them, and were leading them you know where, I 
 would first of all try to make them see that in 
 the habit of drink they are selling themselves — 
 yes, and the children they love better than them- 
 selves — to perpetual slavery. I should show 
 them that in a country like this, with open 
 lines of promotion, no man is kept digging in 
 the mud unless he keeps himself there. I 
 should show them that in that slavery they 
 are open to the competition of the heaviest 
 brute and the strongest, who is too dull to do 
 better, — by which I mean, to him, easier. I 
 should show them that every starving nation in 
 Europe, in Asia, or in Africa, sent over ship-
 
 WORK AND LABOR. 249 
 
 loads of competitors to lower their wages for 
 them. I should show them that while they 
 were drinking-men they would never rise a 
 hand's breadth above this position of drudg- 
 ery ; and the reason I would urge to compel 
 them to take the pledge and to keep it would 
 be that thus they began their upward step, with 
 some purpose and some hope. I should show 
 them what we Christians mean when we speak 
 of ' The glorious liberty of the sons of God.' 
 
 " I am no preacher, friends, as you know. I 
 do not pretend to bring you a sermon. But I 
 dare not stop till I have said that you will find 
 every word I have said better said in the four 
 gospels, and in the letters of that master-work- 
 man, as I have heard Mr. Sherlock call him, — 
 that master-workman in the craft of tent-mak- 
 ing, Paul of Tarsus. That men may come into 
 the glorious liberty of the sons of God, the 
 Saviour of men begs them to come up higher. 
 That they may do so, St. Paul begs them to 
 forget the things that are behind, and to reach 
 forth to the things that are before. To do this 
 they need, first of all, for the glorious renewal 
 of the new birth, to master the body, to master 
 the mind, by the sway of the Holy Spirit ; and 
 this means that they will, step by step and day by 
 day, mount from that drudgery in which brute 
 force toils with things, up into that higher life in 
 which the children of God subdue the world."
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 COMMUNISM, 
 
 THEY had an old Scotchman in the count- 
 ing-room at Hampton, named Dugdale. 
 He said he knew nothing about their business, 
 for that he was a cotton-bug. But, in truth, he 
 had a Scotchman's habit of turning his hand to 
 many things ; he had seen many more countries 
 than Ulysses ever saw, and many more men ; 
 and, having kept his eyes open, he had learned 
 something from every man and every country. 
 
 He was so old now that he did not like work 
 at the loom, and had even given up the superin- 
 tendence of one of the weaving-rooms, where he 
 had long been a master. And now he was the 
 chief book-keeper of the concern. 
 
 I was interested to find that he knew per- 
 sonally Robert Owen, whose experiments at 
 New Lanark, in social order, attracted so much 
 attention in their time, and were supposed by 
 so many intelligent people to carry with them 
 the secret of the industries of the future, — to 
 exhibit, indeed, the " Kingdom of Heaven " in 
 the form which it was to take on earth.
 
 COMMUNISM. 251 
 
 The Emperor Alexander of Russia visited 
 New Lanark ; and Robert Owen went to Elba 
 to persuade the exiled Napoleon that here was 
 the secret of the future. 
 
 Dugdale had never worked in his mills. He 
 was not old enough. But as a baby he had been 
 attended to in the "' Eccaleobion," which Robert 
 Owen provided for the sustenance of all, babies 
 after they were well hatched. And in later life 
 he had made a pilgrimage to New Lanark to 
 see the wrecks of that incipient " City of God," 
 which had not life enough to live. Very sad it 
 was, he said, to find astronomical drawings of 
 real value, which had been prepared for popular 
 lectures, lying under the foot of man, half-buried 
 by the plaster which had fallen from the ceiling 
 of the lecture-room. 
 
 Dugdale told me this story one evening, and 
 it was a very good text for the consideration of 
 dear old Owen's plans, from which we branched 
 off — or some of the men present did — into talk 
 of Fourier and his Phalanstery, of St. Simon, 
 and of some of the later forms of what is called 
 Socialism, and of what is called Communism. 
 
 Dugdale said — and I think— that the super- 
 ficial writers, particularly the writers for the 
 press, in their ignorance of the subjects which 
 they pretend to consider, had clouded all discus- 
 sions by mixing up Communism with a «, as he
 
 252 HOW TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 said, with Communism with an o. The old word 
 " Communism," with its accent on the first sylla- 
 ble, meant one thing. It meant property in com- 
 mon, as the Shakers of America hold it to-day, 
 or as the Iroquois Indians of New York held it. 
 What he called Communism with a u, is the 
 notion of the violent French radicals, who want 
 to exaggerate local government, the government 
 of the Commune, or, as we should say, of the 
 township. It is a miserable misfortune for all 
 sensible discussion, that the two words happen 
 to be spelled with the same letters. For they 
 mean two wholly different things. Yet you can 
 hardly find a recent pamphlet on the subject 
 which is not obscured by a carelessness about 
 two things, which have hardly anything to do 
 with each other. 
 
 Dugdale had himself, in earlier life, tried 
 some of the socialistic and communistic experi- 
 ments. He had even spent part of one winter 
 with the Shakers, He had read some of the 
 best-digested French plans. I found he knew 
 about the Familistere at Guise. And, indeed, 
 he went into the philosophy of the system of 
 the Iroquois as I had never heard any Ameri- 
 can do, even if he were a citizen of the state 
 of New York. 
 
 In point of fact, he said, — and I have satisfied 
 myself that the remark is true, — property in
 
 COMMUNISM. 253 
 
 common, if one may use words so contradictor}^ 
 was the beginning of property in more savage 
 times, out of which we have gradually emerged, 
 and we are to look back into semi-barbarism 
 for an illustration of it, instead of looking for- 
 ward into a higher civilization. If Mr. Henry 
 George really wants to see what happens, when 
 all land is owned by the state, let him go to 
 the Cherokee Reservation, in the Indian Terri- 
 tory, where land is held so now. He can see 
 how he likes that. It is by gradually working 
 upward and outward from this common holding 
 of which every country in the world has illus- 
 trations in its earlier history, that we have 
 come out on the system of to-day. In to-day's 
 system a great deal of wealth is still held in 
 common. It is " Res Publica," the Common 
 Wealth. But for certain things, men and 
 women have preferred to have their own 
 "proper "-ty. 
 
 Dugdale said that when Robert Owen was 
 eighty years old, as eager as ever in his hopes 
 for the *' Family Unions," as he called his vil- 
 lages, he himself asked the old man what 
 people would do when the world was all mathe- 
 matically adjusted. Dugdale expresses the fear 
 that it would be a very stupid world. 
 
 " Do ! " cried the old reformer, with a blaze 
 of lisfht as from heaven on his face. " Do ?
 
 254 IIOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON, 
 
 Why, they will travel ! Tliink of the joy of 
 travelling, without expense, without fatigue, 
 and zutt/ioiit bagi^age.'' 
 
 And he explained that the traveller would 
 telegraph in advance that he was coming, and 
 would find clean clothing laid out for him in 
 his bed-room, fitted to his size, — five feet 
 seven, or six feet three, as the case might be. 
 
 Dugdale had intimated, in reply, that most 
 men had a fancy for wearing their own shirts. 
 
 Really, in this anecdote, the whole principle 
 was involved. On the whole, men preferred to 
 ozvn their oivji shirts, their own axes, penknives, 
 pens, paper, and so their own houses, oxen, 
 horses and barns. John likes to drive a 
 fiery trotter, who wall go on the road at 2.40. 
 William had rather drive a quiet family beast, 
 w^ho will not annoy him as they go on the road, 
 but wall bring him out safely six miles at the 
 end of an hour. Because, on the whole, man- 
 kind prefers private property in certain things, 
 men have private property in certain things. 
 
 But there is other property, which is Common 
 Wealth, and the government of the Common 
 Wealth holds it and administers it. Un- 
 doubtedly it is a subject for discussion and 
 experiment how much of such property there 
 shall be. Indeed, it may be wise for one com- 
 munity to hold certain wealth in common,
 
 COMMUNISM. 255 
 
 while another community finds it best to hold 
 it in severalty. The weakness of Mr. Spencer's 
 discussion of this subject, as of many other dis- 
 cussions from different English radicals, comes 
 on their insisting on classing all property to- 
 gether, and protesting against any claims of 
 Government. This comes from the dread 
 which their fathers were bred in, by the mal- 
 administration of a landed aristocracy. 
 
 But, on the whole, it has proved advisable 
 that the nation shall own the light-houses. 
 Next to these, it has proved advisable that it 
 shall own the high-roads, that they shall not 
 be owned by private companies. In America 
 we are satisfied that the state should own the 
 school-houses. Whether it shall own the higher 
 schools, — the colleges and universities, — has 
 not been decided in an experience. Some states, 
 as Michigan and Wisconsin, own the buildings 
 and funds of their universities, and administer 
 them. In some states, as in Massachusetts and 
 Connecticut, they are the property of distinct 
 corporations. Most American cities think it 
 best to own their own water-works. The reser- 
 voirs, the pipes, and all the apparatus, are part 
 of the wealth in common belonging to the 
 Commonwealth. There seems to be no princi- 
 ple which should prevent the city government 
 from owning the gas-works and gas-pipes, in
 
 256 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 the same way. But, on the whole, the present 
 habit is to leave this j)roperty to speeial corpora- 
 tions. 
 
 In the same way, it would be hard to define 
 any principle which should prevent a state from 
 owning a railway, — as, indeed, many of the 
 European states do, — as most states own the 
 ordinary road-way, on which foot-men, horses, 
 cattle, and ordinary carriages travel. Whoever 
 will take the pains, in his own neighborhood, 
 to calculate how much money has been spent 
 by the public upon roads, court-houses, school- 
 houses, and other public buildings, water-works, 
 street-lamps, and other similar conveniences, 
 will find very soon, that nearly or quite half the 
 property, in that neighborhood is now the Com- 
 mon-Wealth. There has been no prejudice 
 against that sort of wealth, where it is the 
 most convenient form of property. But there 
 is other property which, on the whole, in the 
 experience of mankind, it has proved best to 
 reserve for separate or individual holding. 
 This is what we commonly call personal prop- 
 erty. Between the two is real estate, which 
 is held by the individual as personal property, 
 but, at the same time, is held under the emi- 
 nent domain of society, which takes it when it 
 chooses for a railway, a canal, a reservoir, a 
 school-house, a public library, or any other
 
 COMMUNISM. 257 
 
 purpose where, on the whole, its use is needed 
 for or by the Commonwealth. 
 
 Of course it is true, that, as civilization goes 
 forward, new experiments may be tried, and new 
 adjustments may be found necessary. If a town- 
 ship happened to hold a great water-power, it 
 might find it desirable to establish an electric 
 plant, for light, as a part of the wealth in com- 
 mon. Having established it for the highways, it 
 would be absurd not to permit its use in separate 
 homes, if there were light enough to be used so. 
 
 In just the same way most of our states have 
 found it convenient to institute state asylums 
 for insanity, for the blind, the deaf, and the 
 dumb. Large cities find it convenient to es- 
 tablish hospitals for the sick, as a part of their 
 wealth in common. There is no principle which 
 prevents a small village from doing the same 
 thing. But, in a small village, the necessity 
 does not press in the same way, and certain in- 
 conveniences prevent such an arrangement. In 
 either case, however, the institution is founded, 
 — or it is not founded, — as the oarticular exi- 
 gency may demand. 
 
 Now the difficulty in all the grand paper 
 theories, for arranging the common wealth, has 
 been that infallibly there has been a vein of 
 patronage or condescension visible all along in 
 the arrangements of the projector. Robert
 
 258 HOW THEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 Owen really thought that he knew how to 
 take care of little babies better than their 
 mothers did. So he took the babies into a 
 common nursery, while the mothers worked at 
 spinning-jennies or looms. He went so far as 
 to indicate in advance the cut of the dress 
 which children were to wear at play. St. Si- 
 mon, Fourier, and the whole tribe take just the 
 same strain. They talk of "laborers," or the 
 "proletariat," or the "working-class," — just as 
 you might talk of the mackerel you meant to 
 catch, or of the pounds of steam which were to 
 drive your piston. What follows ? Why, as soon 
 as Dale Owen carries a colony to New Harmony, 
 it goes to pieces on a rebellion about this mat- 
 ter of dress. Garfield said : " That all the peo- 
 ple are much wiser than any one of the people." 
 The people know what they want much better 
 than any student of their wants knows. They 
 know where the shoe pinches, and what hinge 
 needs oil. 
 
 And the danger and the failure of what are 
 called socialistic schemes, — or communistic 
 schemes, social unions, phalansteries, or what- 
 ever they are called, — spring from their being 
 imposed from above below, in this infatuation 
 of superiority. It all belongs to the middle 
 ages, and to feudalism, where a baron at once 
 protected and directed his inferiors.
 
 COMMUNISM. 259 
 
 But begin at the other end, — begin on the 
 Christian principle, where he who is greatest 
 among you is your servant, and is only great 
 because he sei'ves, — and you will not have any 
 danger, and your failure will be easily remedied. 
 Let the people associate where they want to 
 and need, and they will work out their own 
 successes. From their experiments have come 
 such triumphs as mutual insurance, as the lim- 
 ited liability laws, as co-operative trade, co-oper- 
 ative banking, co-operative fishing, co-operative 
 house-keeping. If they make a mistake, why, 
 they will stop soon enough. They have no 
 passion for burning their fingers. And where 
 they succeed, they will push forward in the 
 same line, and they will find plenty of imita- 
 tors. 
 
 It ought not to be necessary to say this at 
 any length. Briefly, such success is the Chris- 
 tian success, freely promised to those who seek 
 first the Kingdom of God, and mean to live 
 righteously. He who is greatest among them 
 is their servant. And, in the common service, 
 the common cause succeeds.
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 CONCLUSION, 
 
 IT would not have been difficult to throw this 
 account of Hampton into a more systematic 
 form than has been attempted. But it is desira- 
 ble that such accounts should be read, as well 
 as that they should be written. And I have 
 supposed that, by describing the different feat- 
 ures of the enterprise, with some reference to 
 the different points of view of the persons most 
 engaged in them it would be easier to enlist 
 readers. 
 
 It is not, however, perhaps, going too much 
 into the philosophy of social order, if, in this 
 closing chapter, the writer tries to state a few 
 of the principles on which the success, of such 
 an enterprise as that at Hampton is based. 
 First of all, it is to be remembered that America 
 is, and always was, and always will be, a demo- 
 cratic country, — a country of the people, gov- 
 erned by the people, for the people, in the 
 people's way. It really made no difference 
 whether the allegiance of this country were 
 given to an English king or to an American
 
 CONCLUSION. 261 
 
 constitution. It had been a aemocratic country 
 from the very beginning, and it would not be diffi- 
 cult to show that it could not have been anything 
 else. By this is meant, that the People, having 
 of necessity to take a good deal of the care and 
 arrangement of their own lives, took that care 
 so as a matter of course, that it was always 
 impossible to push or pull them by any wires, 
 as if they were puppets, to be directed by a 
 superior class. The People had made their own 
 roads, had laid out their own towns, had estab- 
 lished their own courts, had created their own 
 local governments ; and a People which had done 
 this was entirely outside of any possible aris- 
 tocratic or despotic governments. This is sim- 
 ply the explanation of the constitutions of the 
 American towns and cities. 
 
 A man has only to see how the roads are 
 mended in a country community in America, 
 to understand what is meant by the popular 
 direction in public affairs. It is no engineer, 
 sent down from a central capital, who brings 
 with him experts, trained to road-building, and 
 what the French would call "proletaries" to 
 execute their orders. It is, on the other hand, 
 the people of the farms who are themselves to 
 ride over the roads, who come, at a day almost 
 self-appointed, with their oxen, their shovels, 
 their picks, and their hoes, and execute to-
 
 262 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 gether certain work which the experience of 
 the neighborhood shows necessary. There is 
 probably some person in nominal authority, 
 who is called a "supervisor of the roads," but 
 this man acts, and knows he acts, under the 
 appointment of the very people whose work he 
 is supposed to direct, and the correction of any 
 faults of the roads might fairly be said to be 
 due to a popular rising in the neighborhood for 
 that purpose. 
 
 Upon people so trained and habituated to 
 using their own personal judgment in the man- 
 agement of their own affairs, there was super- 
 imposed, by the changes of life and business, 
 what we call the factory system. There has 
 never been any trouble in the factory system in 
 America, when the conditions were such that 
 the instincts of the national popular life could 
 be maintained. That is to say, if the people 
 themselves who were to do the work, felt that 
 they had some discretion in the matter, and 
 could bring some of their own intelligence to 
 bear on the matter, they have never had any 
 difficulty in carrying forward the manufacturing 
 process on a large scale, with great precision 
 and with important results. But, on the other 
 hand, any person who is accustomed to the 
 direction of "laborers," laboring men, or "oper- 
 atives," in the countries of Europe, finds, from
 
 CONCLUSION. 263 
 
 the very beginning, that this direction from 
 above working below, autocratic in its charac- 
 ter, and savoring rather of Celtic than of Teu- 
 tonic life, is met with obstacles at every step. 
 
 Whenever we hear of a difficulty in a mill, or 
 a misunderstanding between employers and em- 
 ployed, it may be said, almost with certainty, 
 that the parties on the one side or the other 
 have deviated, perhaps of necessity, from the 
 original idea, which is, at bottom, the idea of 
 mutual help or co-operation. 
 
 It has been intimated in these pages more 
 than once that wherever the American idea is 
 permitted to assert itself the results are simple 
 and satisfactory, as in the well-known instance 
 of the Nantucket whale-fishery, and the fisheries 
 for mackerel and cod carried on from both the 
 large capes of Massachusetts Bay. It would 
 even be fair to take the great military achieve- 
 ments of the volunteer armies of the United 
 States as an illustration of what is gained when 
 the national principle is permitted to assert it- 
 self. If, after one of the great conscriptions of 
 Europe, it were proposed that the recruits 
 should hold an election to choose their captains 
 and lieutenants, it may almost be said that 
 every commanding officer now on the continent 
 of Europe would commit liari-kari, or seek a 
 happy release in the face of a proposal which
 
 264 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 he would consider as, in itself, so fatal to all 
 energy and authority. But when the United 
 States had occasion to call, not for recruits, but 
 for volunteers, and to bring those volunteers 
 into the field, the states which were in the 
 habit of intrusting to their soldiers the election 
 of their own lieutenants and captains found no 
 occasion to change their habit ; and the disci- 
 pline of that army was maintained with pre- 
 cisely the same precision that belongs to what 
 we call the regular army of the United States, 
 in which no such privilege was ever sought for 
 or expected. That is to say, the people of the 
 United States understand perfectly well that 
 there must be order, there must be command, 
 there must be authority. But, on the other 
 hand, the people of the United States, from 
 the very nature of their being, from the cir- 
 cumstances which called them into existence, 
 understand that they are the real fountain of 
 authority, order, and command, and they like to 
 be consulted before authority is asserted. 
 
 All this, it may be said, is merely theoretical. 
 Possibly it is so ; but the theory involved is 
 based upon national habits which it is impossi- 
 ble to pass by without consideration. Now, the 
 problem before men who would organize indus- 
 try on a large scale, for any specific purpose, 
 involves, first of all, the question how the organ-
 
 CONCLUSION. 265 
 
 ization to be made shall move easily and without 
 friction. How shall you enlist the good-will of 
 those who must work together in this system ? 
 This is really the first question. The first ques- 
 tion is not how shall you secure the largest 
 market, or how shall you make the most money. 
 If the institution is to be a permanent institu- 
 tion, the question is. How are you to secure the 
 good-will of all hands engaged ? 
 
 It may be granted that the visible result does 
 not very much differ, though it has been pro- 
 duced in half a dozen different ways. A com- 
 pany, for instance, whose troops or whose 
 officers have been commissioned by a higher 
 authority, would not differ in the aspect of a 
 parade from a company of volunteer troops 
 whose officers have been, nominally at least, 
 chosen by the privates. But if, in one of these 
 two cases, there were harmony and good feeling 
 and alacrity among the men, and in the other 
 case you found nothing better, perhaps, than 
 indifference, or at least willingness to obey, 
 there would be a difference in the quality of 
 the thing done, which would give the preference 
 to one system or the other. 
 
 It is certainly true that in industries not re- 
 quiring the co-operation of very large numbers 
 of persons, it is easy to obtain that sympathy 
 and good-will of all hands which is desired,
 
 266 HOW TIIKV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 wilhout any very formal effort for the purpose. 
 Most agricultural industries can be carried on 
 with that good-natured fellow-feeling which has 
 been described as belonging to the race, — the 
 willingness, on the one hand, to lend a hand, 
 with the expectation, on the other hand, of re- 
 spect and confidence. The book in the reader's 
 hand is an effort to show that the same sympa- 
 thy, niutual regard, and mutual help may be 
 obtained in the largest processes of manufac- 
 turing, as it is attained on board of a fishing- 
 smack or a whaling-ship, or in the work of a 
 large farm. 
 
 The principle of co-operation is so essential 
 to all Christian civilization, and has asserted 
 itself with such signal success in many of the 
 walks of industry, that the word is now used, 
 particularly by careless people, as if it were a 
 talisman. The novelist, who has used all the 
 pages of his book for the purpose of showing 
 how terrible is the conflict between the employ- 
 ers and the employed, waves his wand at the 
 end with the word "co-operation," and all bad 
 dragons are expected to sink into the abyss, and 
 good angels to appear in their places. But tt is 
 perfectly well known that the experiments of 
 co-operative industry on a large scale have not 
 succeeded so far as to induce their repetition on 
 a larger scale. Until this measure of success
 
 CONCLUSION. 267 
 
 has been attained, it is necessary to study the 
 experiments which have been made, to see in 
 what is the point of faikire. 
 
 As the reader knows, the writer believes that 
 the failure is due to the neglect of skilful Man- 
 agement. In most co-operative enterprises it 
 is taken for granted that if you have a great 
 body of privates any fool can command them. 
 Such is apt to be the feeling of insurgents when 
 they rise to a great but new duty. No fallacy 
 is more dangerous, and no statement is more 
 false. The success of a business enterprise de- 
 pends entirely upon the skill with which it is 
 Managed, and upon the faithfulness and con- 
 stancy and courage of its managers. Unless 
 the necessity for such gifts is recognized at the 
 very outset, unless they are rated where they 
 belong, as among the rare gifts of men, without 
 which success is impossible, the enterprise fails. 
 It fails just as certainly as it would fail if it 
 had no capital, or as it would fail if the work- 
 people all deserted it. To hold in proper re- 
 spect those who mediate between the capitalist 
 and the workmen, to give to them authority, 
 absolute in its place and sufficient for every 
 purpose, — this is the first necessity in such en- 
 terprises. But it is a necessity which has con- 
 stantly been neglected,- — ^one might say, has 
 been almost always neglected, in the plans for
 
 268 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 co-operative industry. There is a general im- 
 pression that the managers must be kept under ; 
 must be kept in a subordinate position. It is 
 thought that they have gained too much in the 
 past, and that, for the future, they must be 
 paying back the debt which has been contracted 
 by their class. And so the enterprise, involving 
 vigorous and loyal effort on the part of the 
 workingmen, fails, as the army would fail which 
 was not led by a skilful and experienced general. 
 The distinctive feature, then, in the Hampton 
 enterprise, as an enterprise of co-operation, is 
 that the Management is recognized as one of 
 the three important factors in the business. 
 We consider it important that the elements of 
 success should be thus classified. The general 
 effort in the past has been to give to Capital 
 the place of Management, and to place the 
 workman in subordination to the union thus 
 formed. The dreams of the future most preva- 
 lent have generally given to the workmen the 
 Management, and made Capital subordinate to 
 the union thus formed. The argument of this 
 book is directed to show that Capital has its 
 place, that Management has its place, and that 
 Work has its place. We believe it will be con- 
 venient to divide about equally the profits of 
 any enterprise between those who represent 
 these three necessary departments of every en-
 
 CONCLUSION. 269 
 
 terprise. We believe that it is as dangerous to 
 combine the one of these departments with the 
 other as it is in civil government to combine 
 the legislative function with the judicial func- 
 tion, or the judicial function with that of the 
 executive. We believe that the general good 
 attained will be in proportion as the three func- 
 tions are kept visibly distinct before all men's 
 eyes. 
 
 It may very well happen that the workingman 
 who is succeeding in life does not choose to con- 
 tinue the investment of his property in the sav- 
 ings bank, but buys into the stock of the com- 
 pany which employs him. So true is it that 
 "corporation is co-operation." But no such dis- 
 position of a man's property is necessary in the 
 Hampton system, as it has been described in 
 these pages ; and it has been more convenient, for 
 tracing the principle involved, to keep the repre- 
 sentatives of Capital, Management, and Industry 
 separate from each other. The author has given 
 to this book as a second title, " Christianity ap- 
 plied to Manufacture." By this he means to inti- 
 mate that the plans of the future for large man- 
 ufacturing will be akin to the American plan for 
 government. They will involve, as an essential 
 element, the ability of the people to direct their 
 own amusements, their own education, their own 
 charities, — in a word, their own social life. As a
 
 270 now TIIKY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 part of this direction, they will have their own 
 personal interest, as they now do, indeed, in the 
 success of the industries which employ them 
 from day to day. It was very natural that a 
 few men of property in large towns should con- 
 ceive the idea of insuring the ships, the houses, 
 or the lives of their persons. But, in the regu- 
 lar growth of an American system, this over- 
 sight of insurance passes from the hands of the 
 few into the hands of the many, and, in the long 
 run, under the system of mutual insurance, the 
 same person is the insurer and the insured. It 
 is by a movement precisely parallel, as the au- 
 thor conceives, that the manufacturing of Amer- 
 ica has developed on democratic lines. Exactly 
 as insurance began when a few rich men met in 
 a counting-house and planned an insurance com- 
 pany, the large manufactures began when a few 
 rich men met and planned a cotton factory or a 
 woollen mill. But, by a growth exactly anala- 
 gous to the growth of mutual insurance, it will 
 probably prove that the persons who have in 
 hand the raw materials and work them up will 
 be counted in, not simply as passive, but among 
 the interested allies in the manufacture to which 
 they lend themselves. There will result a sym- 
 pathy and common force which is gained when 
 a body of people say, " We are going to do this," 
 or "We are going to do that," and which cannot
 
 CONCLUSION. 271 
 
 exist when they say, " He proposes this," or 
 "He proposes that." It will be for the next 
 generation to indicate the steps by which this 
 enlargement of human power will be attained. 
 Of those steps the watchword is "Together." 
 
 One has not far to go in the history of Amer- 
 ica to find the illustrations of the principle in- 
 volved in every stage of our social history. It 
 would be fair to say that, from Maine to Florida, 
 from the Atlantic to the Pacific, there is not a 
 community, large or small, which has been es- 
 tablished, in its present condition at the fiat of 
 a superior power. The principle of successful 
 republican administration has been, on the other 
 hand, the movement of the people, and the par- 
 ticipation of the people. Louis XIV. could give 
 the orders for the foundation of the city of 
 Orleans. But, though it held the comm.and of 
 the commerce of the Mississippi Riv^er, the lit- 
 tle port, created to order, was an insignificant 
 hamlet, until, in a new dynasty, the People who 
 wanted to use the advantages of that position 
 swept in upon it, and gave to it a new birth. 
 The Middle states can show hundreds of the 
 ruins of fanciful colonies, established from above, 
 by this or that schemer who meant — as Robert 
 Owen did, as St. Simon did — to bring in a new 
 kingdom. But such endeavors have regularly 
 failed. The unsuccessful colonies established
 
 2/2 now THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 before the time of Jamestown were similar fail- 
 ures. The colony of Virginia almost failed, for 
 a like reason, and it was not until a popular ele- 
 ment was introduced in her affairs that a favor- 
 able era of prosperity set in. Exactly the same 
 is true of the early history of the Carolinas. 
 
 On the other hand, the states in which emi- 
 gration is as free as air, irresistibly, from the 
 law of man's nature, one might say, prospered. 
 A dozen men, with their families, be it observed, 
 found themselves neighbors of each other on 
 the same township or grant, or, if they preceded 
 any survey, in the same valley. Infallibly they 
 consulted together about building the necessary 
 roads and bridges. Roads and bridges may be 
 said to be the first necessity of organized so- 
 ciety. For defence against savages, perhaps 
 for carrying the mail, and, before long, for com- 
 mon worship, for common education, these men 
 must meet together. Every one is interested. 
 Every one expresses his interest. Every one 
 offers his plan. If a plan is tried and fails, the 
 experiment has been on so small a scale that no 
 one suffers greatly. If it is tried and succeeds, 
 every little community in the neighborhood tries 
 the experiment again, and it works its way over 
 the land. 
 
 It is in this freedom by which every man acts, 
 and is expected to act in social affairs, that the
 
 CONCLUSION. 273 
 
 mystery and majesty of self-government consist. 
 The writers of Europe generally misapprehend 
 self-government, and the European advisers of 
 America misapprehend it. Self-government does 
 not consist in the election, by any "plebiscite" 
 or other public act, of the magistrate or emperor 
 who is to govern the people. Self-government 
 does not appear till the people govern them- 
 selves. In homes, in churches, in the meetings 
 of school districts or of townships, in the affairs 
 of insurance companies or railways, in lodges, 
 chapters, commandaries, and posts of charitable 
 societies, the people which is used to self-gov- 
 ernment carries out its methods of self-govern- 
 ment. Among the methods, one is the choice 
 of a chief magistrate, to attend to certain 
 national affairs, to which kings attend in other 
 nations. But this man is not the ruler of the 
 nation which chooses him ; on the other hand, 
 he is ruled by the nation. 
 
 Any enterprise which is to succeed in Amer- 
 ica recognizes as a very important element for 
 success this aptness of the people for self-gov- 
 ernment and the manifold triumphs which have 
 sprung from it. The successful projector leaves 
 every agent, as far as possible, to work with his 
 own tools, in his own way, to bring his own con-
 
 2/4 1"^^^' Tiii'v livp:d in hampton. 
 
 tribution to the common weal, and is glad to 
 accept the intelligent suggestion and co-opera- 
 tion of all concerned. He is glad to have public 
 o})inion and the public sentiment on his side. 
 He does not resent advice from one of his 
 hands. He is glad if any one of them speaks 
 of "our success, our plans, our improvement." 
 
 One of the most intelligent English essayists 
 on the modern inventions in mechanical art says 
 distinctly that to this ready co-operation of the 
 workmen in the American shops is due, in large 
 measure, the success of American novelties in 
 machinery. He says that a new model intro- 
 duced in an American shop challenges the inter- 
 est of everybody. Everybody is ready to make a 
 suggestion. Everybody wants it to succeed. The 
 men set to work upon it, cherish it as if it were 
 their own. It has the best chance from the 
 beginning. The contrast which he draws, from 
 the cool and indifferent reception of a new in- 
 vention in an English shop, need not be quoted 
 here. It is not flattering. At bottom the com- 
 mon feeling of mutual help, trained by all true 
 American institutions, is the origin of the cordial 
 welcome thus given to the new invention. 
 
 Men like to work together. They have a com- 
 mon share, of course, in the common weal, and 
 they are glad to have it recognized. 
 
 Now in the village of Hampton this com-
 
 CONCLUSION. 275 
 
 mon force of the "together" was recognized, 
 not simply in political government, but, as the 
 reader has seen, in all their affairs. It was not 
 necessary to import such an arrangement, or to 
 ask any legislator to devise it for them. The 
 people drifted into the plan 
 
 "From native impulse, elemental force." 
 Thus, a detail as much parted from their 
 political system as was the management of 
 their amusements, took care of itself, as one 
 is tempted to say, because it was every man's 
 affair. It is not quite just to say that no one 
 takes care of that which every one should care 
 for. It may be that selfish men hold back, it 
 often is so. But let it be proudly recognized, 
 that the responsibility of any enterprise is with 
 the community and not with the individual, and, 
 as in the case of Dick Sheridan's district meet- 
 ing, which has been described, the community 
 can be made to understand its responsibility. 
 When it is made to understand it and to accept 
 it, it will go forward much more steadily than 
 when it is instructed from above or commanded 
 from above. So it proved in the matter of 
 amusements. This community provided for 
 them lavishly, while it provided for them in- 
 telligently. It did so because the leaders of 
 opinion trusted the people with a matter wliich 
 specially concerned the people. The people,
 
 276 HOW TIIEV LIVKD IX HAMPTON. 
 
 in consequence, secured amusements which 
 amused, and entertainments which entertained. 
 At the same time, these were amusements and 
 entertainments which did not degrade or con- 
 taminate their children. 
 
 The same thing is to be said of the public 
 library. One finds, not infrequently, a large 
 foundation for a public library, in which the 
 annual income is carefully, even wisely, ex- 
 pended, but where the real people of the place, 
 for whom such costly provision is made, do not 
 avail themselves of the books which are at their 
 hands. You shall find that in one town a free 
 library is diligently and largely used, and, in 
 another town, that a better library is hardly 
 used at all. You may go into a large and ele- 
 gant reading-room of a winter evening, to find 
 perhaps one boy, for whom all this lavish prep- 
 aration has been made. The other boys and the 
 girls, the men and the women, have not accepted 
 the "silent friends" who are waiting for them. 
 The books stand not read upon the shelves. 
 
 The people of Hampton secured themselves 
 from such mortification, because they themselves 
 conducted, as they had organized, their library. 
 They knew what they wanted, and they bought 
 it. It was well for them, perhaps, that they had 
 not too large a fund for the purchase of books. 
 They counted the dollars which they spent, and
 
 CONCLUSION. 277 
 
 they spent them well. But nothing was more 
 clear than that the hbrary did not suffer because 
 it depended upon the public generosity. There 
 was nothing, I was told, for which money was 
 voted so generously in the annual meeting. 
 " After they once tasted blood," Mr, Spinner 
 said to me, " they were always ready to vote the 
 appropriations." 
 
 The readjustment of the savings bank, which 
 has been described, was simply the application 
 of the same habit. It came from the magic of 
 "together." If there is mutual insurance, why 
 not mutual banking .■• If a poor man can place 
 money on deposit, why may he not draw it, if he 
 have good indorsers .-* There is no greater mis- 
 take than that which supposes that, because a 
 man has but little, he will be careless about 
 investment. He is more careful than the man 
 of millions. And the necessity of keeping well 
 what they had earned hardly, made the Hampton 
 weavers very cautious before they granted their 
 indorsements. 
 
 It has been intimated already, more than once, 
 that the success of their movement, in one detail 
 or another, sprang from their willingness to sub- 
 mit to Christian requisitions, while they claimed 
 and expected the advantages promised to tiie
 
 2/8 HOW TIIEY LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 living" cliildrcn of the living God. They were 
 willing to do their share in working out their 
 own -salvation, and they knew that while they 
 worked, God worked with them. They were 
 not expecting the coming of any kingdom for 
 which they had not made some sacrifice them- 
 selves. And it was because they trusted the 
 God to whom they prayed, that they believed 
 that the Christian law of love would be sufficient 
 for their enterprise. 
 
 These sketches of the prosperity which fol- 
 lows on an attempt to carry out Christian law 
 in Christian love, are dedicated to any man and 
 woman who seek in the Gospel the direction 
 for daily life. It is not pretended that such 
 plans will recommend themselves to individuals 
 who want to live alone, every man for himself, 
 or who seek only the separate indulgences of 
 such lonely life. For such men it may be freely 
 granted that the cold-blooded maxims of the 
 economists are the only maxims. But the suc- 
 cess of these maxims in the social history of the 
 world has not been so decided that the}' should 
 tempt any one to accept them as a rule of life. 
 
 Such plans for the good of all, as those 
 attempted at Hampton, could not have been 
 carried out in any heathen civilization. They 
 would have failed in ancient Rome ; they would 
 have failed in Athens ; they would have failed
 
 CONCLUSION. 279 
 
 in ancient Jerusalem. They belong only in the 
 social system founded by the Saviour of man- 
 kind, among men and women who hope to'live 
 in His Spirit and by His Law. 
 
 Perhaps this has been said often enough, as 
 the different chapters have described different 
 details. The men and women who embark on 
 such plans must understand in their personal 
 religious experience, that " if one member suffer 
 all the members suffer with it," and that if 
 one member is to rejoice all the members will 
 rejoice with it. They will remember that the 
 Saviour, in His promises for the coming of the 
 Kingdom of God, does not address such prom- 
 ises to any one lonely follower. He takes it 
 for granted, rather, that such lonely follower 
 breathes the common life of the church, and 
 that its life-blood flows in his veins. It is to 
 the "little flock" that he promises the King- 
 dom. And to the flock, "if j^ seek the King- 
 dom of God," He promises the temporal success 
 which belongs with the Kingdom, and is the 
 reward of such endeavor. It is nowhere prom- 
 ised to the Buddhist, satisfied with self-inspec- 
 tion ; it is nowhere promised to the hermit, 
 parting himself from men. It is promised to 
 those who arc sons and daughters of God, 
 united in one Spirit, who pray with one prayer 
 to the Father.
 
 280 lunv TIIEV LIVED IN HAMPTON. 
 
 By a movement perfectly steady and assured, 
 the Christian cliurch has moved forward on the 
 lines thus indicated. 
 
 It abolished human slavery, — first in the 
 Roman luupirc, and eventually in the Christian 
 world. 
 
 It raised the condition of woman, — first to 
 the condition she had enjoyed in the Holy 
 Land, eventually to a grade where she is the 
 recognized equal of man. 
 
 The feudal system, under Christian lead, took 
 the place of the social tyranny of Rome, and, 
 in its turn, gave way to the social order which 
 gives every man and woman equal rights before 
 the law. 
 
 As it advances, the Christian Spirit provides 
 for the humblest and weakest child of God the 
 same privileges for health, for education, for 
 development, as are provided for the richest. 
 
 In government, as the Spirit of Christ and 
 His Law take more possession of men, the Peo- 
 ple rules itself, — it is no longer under the direc- 
 tion of any man or any class. The Saviour's 
 word is fulfilled, and " he who is greatest among 
 you is your servant." The word "democracy" 
 means simply the application of Christianity in 
 politics. 
 
 It is for the next century and the closing 
 years of this to show how these eternal princi-
 
 CONCLUSION. 281 
 
 pies of a divine life are to inspire the great 
 commercial movements of modern time. In 
 manufacture, in all the applications of science 
 for the comfort of mankind, and in that trade 
 in which nation exchanges products against 
 nation and man against man, the divine law is 
 to reign. Such social arrangements also are 
 to come into God's Kingdom. Men will not be 
 content to live every man for himself, nor to 
 die every man for himself. In work, in art, 
 in study, in trade, — in all life, indeed, — the 
 children of God, called by a Saviour's voice, 
 will wish to live in the common cause. They 
 will live for the common wealth, — this is the 
 modern phrase. They will bear each other's 
 burdens, — this is the phrase of Paul. They 
 will live in the life of Love. And it will prove 
 true, as it was promised, that all things are 
 added to the community which thus seeks the 
 Kingdom of God and His Righteousness. 
 
 THE END.
 
 ^■<^> 
 
 lego 
 
 *^'nia, Saji Dir" ^ 
 
 DATE 
 
 DUE 
 
 
 
 C^^^^^ 
 
 '.^f^:^^-.- 
 
 Ubr.
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY f- 
 
 
 
 ■S'^fTr: 
 
 .Y^iMStilii: ■" ' 
 
 r- 
 
 f^ 
 
 r